If You Could Read My Mind

If you live in Southern Ontario you will have seen a lot of coverage in the newspapers, on the internet, and on the television and radio today about Tim Horton’s, and their firing and re-hiring of a woman in one of their franchise locations in London, Ontario. The links to the various local, national, and international news outlets stories are below:

Reuters International - Woman fired for giving 16-cent treat to toddler

Epicurious - Tim Horton’s Hates Babies

The Globe and Mail - Tims eats humble pie to avert PR catastrophe

CBC - Tempest over a Timbit: fired Tim Horton’s cashier gets her job back

CTV - Employee fired over free Timbit getting job back

The Toronto Star - Tim Horton’s rehires mother fired over Timbit

The Toronto Sun - Woman fired, rehired for giving baby free Timbit

City News - Woman Fired For Giving Tot A Free Timbit

Here’s the thing. When you have some power-mad moron who is promoted to a management job, and they are horribly under-qualified, as was obvious in this case, and when personalities dictate management policy over the policy manual or basic COMMON SENSE (which was obviously lacking in this case), then you get a massive dose of bad publicity as the chain’s head office has been getting today.

Please allow me to contribute to that piling on.

How stupid do you have to be to allow this to take place? Are your franchisees and their management teams not receiving any basic business training? (That is a particularly obvious YES in this case.) Is there no monitoring at all over what takes place in your franchise locations? Do your regional managers regularly discuss confidential personnel matters in public, with the media? If Gordon Ramsay can employ over 200 mystery shoppers to give him daily reports on what happens in his restaurants, perhaps it might be a good idea to invest in something similar, d’ya think?

So, a regular customer comes into your store, they are holding a fussy baby, and rather than having a small child having a meltdown and disturbing your customers, you offer the child a treat which improves their mood and avoids a meltdown which will only serve to irritate other customers in the store and garner the mother holding the child a plethora of filthy looks. You know you have all done it before, someone is dragging a shrieking child around a store, and you shoot a few withering looks at the parent involved. As Mother has always said, any parent worthy of children knows that when the little tykes get tired and cranky, or need changing, you had best deal with the issue straight away. Small children get overtired and then they get cranky as all get out, and what they need is to go home and have a nap… continuing to drag that child from store to store is not in their best interests. But, some people lack the capacity for common sense (especially if you are a manager in this Tim Horton’s store in London, Ontario).

So, for the sake of a 16 cent lump of fried dough, you are willing to chuck a long-term employee onto the street, because there have been complaints about one of the management team (and one of the managers thinks that this employee was the one who complained) - according to some media reports early in the day, and you think it is a firing offence. If someone is skimming money from the till, then THAT is a firing offence. But over a 16 cent piece of fried dough? That is quite simply like killing a bug with a nuclear missile.

Some people really need a good swift slap upside the head, or a good swift kick in the ass.

Were I in the corporate head office, I’d be taking a long and hard look at the management idiot who instigated this whole thing, and publicly embarrassed the company throughout the entire day and for days to come. When the media sinks their teeth into a juicy story like this one, it is going to be reported on for days on end, and with the assistance of the internet, you are going to be GLOBALLY embarrassed. I’ll bet more than a few of your shareholders are more than a little bit pissed right now. (I checked my portfolio overnight and one of the mutual funds holds THI … time to have a chat with the fund manager about this.)

Amongst many of my contacts in the concrete jungle (also known as the financial district for you regular readers playing the home game), the standard statement I heard throughout the day was that the next time they have a desire for a coffee or a doughnut, the refrain will be “anywhere but Tim’s.” One VP I know at one company told me via e-mail today that he would rather pay Starbucks $5 for a cup of coffee before he would contribute to this kind of corporate behaviour at Tim Horton’s. He also said that they immediately removed Tim Horton’s from their list of approved vendors for providing treats for meetings and other events. And at the earliest opportunity, he will be passing along his company’s decision to blacklist Tim Horton’s to executives from other companies whom he sees regularly at various social events. Looks like this dumb move is going to cost the local stores some major coin. Some people in the upper echelons still see the value of their employees, and why would they support a company who does not?

And don’t bitch and whine about me being unfair… if you had the appropriate policies in place, none of this would have hit the fan publicly, now would it? Especially if your regional manager had kept her big mouth shut when the media came calling. Doesn’t she look like a proper prat now, eh? Oh, and you can just bet that after reading the comments IN THE MEDIA from your regional manager about personnel matters, that more than a few barristers are sharpening their pencils in anticipation of the lawsuit that they are going to slap you silly with. I hope your regional manager has a large appetite for generous servings of crow, as I suspect she’s going to be eating a lot of it in the coming weeks and months (if she still has a job once you people realize the mess she has made IN THE MEDIA REPORTS INTERNATIONALLY).

I am sure the corporate types will huddle in conference rooms, looking to try and find some way to rehabilitate their corporate image after this latest incident. They will spend copious amounts of money on specialized consultants to get piles of paper containing reports and recommendations loaded with corporate buzzwords and jargonistic claptrap. Why don’t they call me, and I’ll give them my crash course in customer delight and corporate best practices, and it can be done on two sheets of paper and take a few hours in one afternoon. And I’ll even promise to leave the whips and cattle prods at home.

Recommendation number 1, tell those three idiot managers at that store and the regional manager with the loose lips, “leave now, and don’t let the doorknob hit ya where the good Lord split ya.”

Recommendation number 2 - customer delight can be achieved for pennies a day, you will earn massive amounts of goodwill, and your shareholders will be happy when they see that you don’t need to spend millions on corporate consultants - common sense is still free of charge and you won’t have to spend a week at some corporate retreat coming up with some nonsensical corporate mission statement to do it

This is going to cost you profits as the story will live on the internet for quite some time. Want to see how? Take a look at all the international news outlets who have reported on this story. I would say you have managed to make complete asses of yourselves GLOBALLY. You might want to congratulate those three idiot managers in that store and the big-mouthed regional manager who have embarrassed you WORLD-WIDE now. Oh, and a press release just ain’t gonna cut it folks… you’re going to need to make some major change of some kind to prove you are more than just some uncaring corporate machine. Yes, this story has been reported on every continent on the face of the planet. Hell, it’s even being reported on behind the Iron Curtain! I somehow feel you are about to make the top three list on MSNBC’s Countdown for The Worst Person In The World. And if the corporate entity (THI-NYSE, THI-TSX) isn’t on that list, then the regional manager quoted in many international stories definitely should be. She commented to the media on personnel matters that are supposed to be confidential. She’d be first on my list to be shown the door… DEFINITELY! Perhaps your Human Resources department should be calling her in for a little chat, eh? (And no, I’m not going to put her name up here, YOU KNOW who she is.)

Man oh man, there are a lot of brain-dead idiots still walking around out there!

Or, to quote comedian Tammy Pescatelli (who is truly hilarious) … “What the hell’s wrong with you?”