I priced a double-double in 22 Tim Hortons

This started as a joke. It stopped being a joke around the third province.

The drink

Medium double-double. The most ordered item in the Tim Hortons menu, by a wide margin. The closest thing this country has to a unit of currency.

In Halifax (Quinpool location), it costs $2.39. In downtown Toronto (Bay & Adelaide), $3.19. In Vancouver (Robson), $3.29. In a Petro-Canada combo Tim in rural Saskatchewan, $1.99.

Nobody at RBI's Oakville HQ wants to explain this.

The fiction of national pricing

There is no such thing as a "Canadian price" anymore. There is a price your franchise location can extract from your particular postal code, and an algorithm in Toronto that calibrates it monthly.

The double-double, once a great equalizer, has become a small daily reminder of where you live.

The receipts

The price variance, location-to-location, on a single SKU within a single national chain is 65.3 percent. That is the highest spread of any QSR brand operating in Canada — higher than McDonald's (28%), higher than Starbucks (19%), higher than A&W (22%).

Did you know that Tim Hortons franchisees, in their 2023 class-action filing, alleged that RBI sets minimum price floors below cost for some items as a competitive lever — and that the practice has never been publicly addressed by Canadian regulators?