“"Family-owned and family-run" Agnew Foods in Kingston, Ontario owns 15 Tim Horton's stores. It employs over 500 people at sub-$15 wages with a meagre benefits package for full-timers that employees have to pay into. It is the second largest private sector employer in Kingston, a city of about 140,000 or so (the Startek call centre is first with only a few more employees).
Seven or eight years ago a court case made average Tim Hortons franchise owner profits public: $265,000 per store each year. A new franchise store is estimated to cost $1 million investment to open.
Going by these greatly dated figures, Agnew Foods is pulling in just shy of $4 million in pure profit each year - and that is most likely on top of generous compensation.
Agnew Foods runs a virtual monopoly in Kingston with only a handful of competing Tim Hortons - most of them corporate-run. Not only that, but it is the single strongest franchisee in town of any fast food chain, meaning it is most likely the dominant in the local market.
Companies like this are the result of the franchise model: a competitive market over time gives way to fewer competitors. In Kingston it has reached the point where there is no chance in hell a new Tim Hortons franchisee can start up, and corporate is unlikely to award such a franchise because it makes no sense in terms of distribution of capital, labour, resources, etc. It is quite easy to see how the geographic spread of the Agnew Foods Tim Hortons stores is designed to cover every major avenue, intersection, interchange, etc.
The franchisees are the frontlines of capturing local and regional markets so corporate can build bases of operations to carry out the same quest for market dominance at the provincial, national and international level. Restaurant Brands International, the parent company of Tim Hortons, owns Burger King and Popeyes Chicken as well. I can't reasonably speculate on the specific strategy of RBI, but there is no question about the company's general goals: profits through market dominance.
Where does this leave a low wage or minimum wage worker at Tim Hortons? Their labour operating the food processing factories, shipping the goods, and serving customers is where all the profits are extracted and flow upwards through the franchisees to corporate. Whatever technological transformations - greater factory automation, touchscreens, mobile apps - they still retain the power to bring RBI to a grinding halt if they withdrew their labour.
The anti-$15 propaganda from employers and fed constantly by the mainstrea media, the cuts to benefits, the scaremongering, bullying, and propagation of fantastic myths about hard work, laziness, education, social status, "lifestyle", race, gender, etc all serve to beat down people, divide them, redirect anger sideways or downward, and undermine workers from building solidarity on the basis of common interests.
The task for anyone who sees the potential power of worker solidarity and identifies it as a strategic power capable of transforming society and destroying the profit system, is to intelligently, patiently, and relentlessly work to build that solidarity and power.” - quoting from DN about the mimimum wage increase and Kingston, Ontario, Tim Horton’s franchise
