Do You Tip at Tim Horton’s? What Happens to All the Tips?

As a former employee of our beloved Tim Horton’s coffee shop and now one of the million tipping customers that indulges in the chains beverage, I have sometimes thought, as a customer, what actually happens to the tip I just gave? Like most people I would normally assume since “Jane” just served me my coffee and that’s who I gave the tip too, Jane would be getting that tip! After having it come up in a conversation with a friend a few weeks ago, in non other than, Tim Horton’s, I decided to do some of my own research. Surprisingly enough after talking to several employees from 10 different Tim Horton’s in Durham Region Ontario, only 20% of the stores allowed employees to keep tips solely to themselves. The remaining 80% had in store policies that dictate what happens to that tip once it has left the hands of the customer.

Curious now aren’t you? Are you now wondering what the 8 remaining stores do with the hundreds of tips that cross their counters daily? So was I so, I decided to have further conversation with employees from the remaining stores. Keep in mind that all employees were interviewed separately and were not given any information about any other employee that volunteered information. Eight of the remaining Tim Horton’s out of the ten followed the same tip distribution policy. If you have ever noticed, the odd time going through drive thru or being served at the counter, servers are taking your order by hand cause it is switch over time. During that time period, all tips are collected and put into one shared bucket and divided equally on payday. I was 100% in disagreement purely based on my opinion that when I give a tip, if I give a tip, its 80% of the time based on the performance of my server, not because its a Tim Horton’s and I feel generous. I do not agree that all employee’s should share the monies earned based on another employees performance. Simply because we all know that not all employee’s share the same work ethics or as eager to do a good job, so why should those who don’t practice those ethics benefit from ones who do? So, I asked just that, why do you share the tips? My answer was simple in the eyes of the employee interviewed, ” We do not share the same store roles, there fore not allowing us to interact with customers to gain opportunity to be rewarded with a tip. This way we all get rewarded for our efforts”. “I will agree to part of that” i said. Those who work hard should be rewarded, but with that “system” lazy people reek the rewards of the energetic. Her answer was not so quick and non existent. That indicated one thing and one thing only to me, the managers of our Timmie’s needs to do some better placing of employees, meaning give every employee the same opportunity to work all stations. Not only does that help with repetition of the same tasks, it allows all employees to gain further CSR skills and assist in making Timmie’s a friendly place to visit. This will allow the employee to generate their own tips based on their performance. Seems only fair to me, but here is the catch, what some stores do that actually allows them to benefit from your generosity.

During conversation with one employee from the one and only store out of the ten I came to learn that the store actually profits from our tips with out actually taking from the tip bucket. Impossible you may think, well there is always a flaw. This in particular store distributed tips on payday yes, but not in a cash gratuity format. The tips that they were to receive were placed on their paychecks and taxed for the owner of the store did not use a pay source like ADP. All checks were made using a purchased software and the taxes were taken off as the program was told to do. Are you still wondering how the store profited from taxing the tip? Simple, what do we do when we file taxes, we claim things to get money back as stores get parts of their taxes back. Since the tips were earnings taxed they received partial compensation come tax time.

So next time were at the counter or driving to the window, keep in mind how much you actually tip and think about where the tip goes. All the stores who used the distribution policy had one Claus that indicated an employee could keep the full tip. That was allowed only if the customer put the tip in a Timmie’s bag and put the employees name on the bag. Who has time for that…. but it gives Timmie’s a way out to say the employee can keep their tips!

Please note that all information in this post is based on the opinions of employees of Tim Horton’s. No employee is or was an authorized representative of the store for media purposes nor was any authorized individual questioned about this article. Tim Horton’s has no affiliation with this information, nor is it proven to be 100% accurate by confirmed fact, only on what I was told.

Cheerz