Welcome to a detailed overview of my experience working at busy Tim Hortons. Note that I worked there in 2019 and some things might have changed now. Their menus definitely did!
Your experience at Tim Hortons will be highly influenced by your team and the manager. It can be so great that you don’t wanna leave the job or such a pain that you will wish to quit every day. And it will all be based on the people around you.
My experience at Tim Hortons was an 8/10 (for a starter part-time job in Canada, not as in career choice).
A lot of people warned me that it would be a tough job, very fast-paced, so stressful, but it actually wasn’t like that. It was fast-paced for sure, but I enjoyed that. 8-hour shifts would just fly by so quick. I only had trouble the first couple of days because I was not used to standing for long hours, but eventually, I got a hold of it.
And, as an employee, we had free access to coffee and free donuts for our break time. On other baked goods and food items, we would get an employee discount, which I think was 10%. I really can’t remember now.
Training
The first two weeks were training, and I got trained at two different locations by amazing trainers. They had a comprehensive detailed training plan, and it was mostly how to make drinks and how to restock inventory and re-fill containers. And you know what? You get to taste all the drinks you make! The reason they did this was so that I would be prepared for taste questions from customers and would be able to make good recommendations. They had cards and booklets on all recipes if you ever forget what goes where.
I liked that they spent time on proper training because most of us tend to dislike our jobs when we aren’t properly trained but are expected to perform well. So that was a plus.
This was my first job working at a front counter handling cash. I am going to be honest, for the first couple of days I was so confused with those loonies, toonies, and quarters, but I eventually got the hang of it.
Team Structure and review
There were mainly four kinds of positions: front counter, drive-thru window worker, drive-thru order taker and soup-sandwich station person. I started at the front-counter and got trained for other areas as time went by. We had a team leader, an Assistant Manager, Manager, and a General Region Manager. Both my assistant manager and store manager were incredibly sweet, funny, and helpful. Most of the team members as well . There were times when I had to stop working and take a laughing break because I could barely catch a breath from so many laughs and giggles that I could barely even stand. Those are the days that I obviously miss.
Shifts and Job duties
Our schedules would be released only a week ahead through emails. I mostly did two full 8-hour shifts on Saturday, Sunday and one 4-hour shift on a weekday. So, I was working only three days a week. There weren’t a lot of staff members so giving away shifts or swapping them was not as easy as compared to Walmart. I worked at a highway location so we would be busy most of the time and thus 8 hours went really quickly for majority of the shifts. We would get 2 15-minute paid breaks but would have to miss one sometimes!
Now, let’s talk about the job duties at Tim Hortons. I would:
· Take orders and prepare the drinks in the order along with getting the baked goods.
· Prepare food orders.
· Clean the counters every now and then, ensuring that the cleaning water are at correct temperature.
· Ensure that we have enough cups under the counter. Bring them from the back and refill them.
· Remove any expired items and restock the fridges.
· Check temperatures for all the food items that would be used in soups and sandwiches.
· Sweep and mop the floors, even clean the washrooms. (I actually enjoyed the cleaning part, as it was a nice break from customers)
Mhh, yeah, that was mostly it.
Definitely, there were some days where I just wanted to jump out of the drive-thru window and just go home. But you know what, any customer service job will have such days, so overlooking those days, the rest was great.
If you have more questions or would like to know more, feel free to leave a comment or contact me.
