It’s Time (Travel) For Tims

Tim Hortons is advertising retro donuts. That is, they're bringing back some of the old donut styles, for a limited time only.

On the one hand, that's nice. I miss dutchies too. On the other hand, this relates to a big part of why public opinion has turned against them in recent years: the selection is nowhere near what it used to be - it seems like every time you go in, there's one less thing on the menu. On the other hand, there will be some bizarre item that wasn’t there last time and won’t be there next time. These retro donuts are just the latest in the dizzying sequence of temporary specials.

I assume their strategy of recent years is to reduce the selection of available products to the bare minimum for efficiency's sake. They then compensate for the lack of variety by having the endless stream of temporary features. Hopefully you won't notice the jelly Timbits are gone if you're distracted by the new Chili Lasagne Bowls. But now the irony is that they're distracting us from the poor selection with the old selection.

I can understand why a company would want to restore some of what customers used to like about them. But being a temporary feature, it feels like a bit of a tease. “Hey remember how great it was when we had a wide variety of products? And you used to like us, not just tolerate us? That was pretty nice. Anyway, time's up! Next month’s feature is Chipotle Omelette Balls. Enjoy!”

I'm trying to imagine which other Canadian companies could restore what people used to like about them. Hudson Bay has already been having occasional pop-up Zellers stores, which is a similarly odd strategy of acknowledging what people used to like about the company, but without actually committing to it. I also remember Muchmusic had a daily retro video show a few years back, but even that’s gone now. Also, there’s quite a few companies like Sears where I’d say, it would be great if they’d go back to existing.

So enjoy the retro donuts while you can, and eat as many as your arteries will allow. If they sell well, maybe they’ll make a return, soon, and bring some of the extinct Timbit varieties with them. Until then, enjoy the Tuscan Sausage Dumplings.

Mamma Mea Culpa

About a year ago, I wrote about the struggles of the Vancouver Canucks, and their ham-handed handling of a midseason coaching change. I complained that while hockey pundits were critical of the team, they didn't do enough to call out the team's institutional incompetence. I also insinuated that new coach Rick Tocchet was a downgrade who was only getting the job through connections with management.

Well, boy do I look stupid now; the Canucks have the second best record in the league. And now I see that Tocchet is far and away the favourite to win coach of the year.

So I decided to go back through my sports articles to see if there were any more embarrassing proclamations I should admit to.

Weep, The North

I talked about the Raptors predicament in 2017, in which they were a good team that didn't appear to have any chance of winning a championship. This was partly due to a lack of superstar talent on the team. And that discussion became a jumping-off point into the philosophy of sports fandom.

But it turned out that journey into sport existentialism was a little premature. Just over a year after that post, the Raptors took advantage of an awkward situation in San Antonio to trade Demar Derozan for Kawhi Leonard, then took advantage of a banged-up Warriors team in the final, and won an unexpected title. So although the deep discussion of the philosophical and psychological purpose of sports fandom is intriguing, it turns out the Raptors weren't as mired in hopelessness as it seemed.

Also bonus marks for my comment that the Leafs might be blocked from winning a Stanley Cup by, "a dynasty developing in Edmonton." For a start, the Leafs current problem is being blocked from getting out of their own division; running into a good team in the finals is a bridge they’ll cross if they ever come to it. And then Edmonton seems cursed by a similar inability to build into contender status.

Of Goats And Men

I mostly stand behind this discussion of the difficulty in naming the best players in various sports. Just keep in mind that it was written back when Brady could still wear all his Superbowl rings on one hand. But it does fall back on the idea that Bill Belichick made Tom Brady look better than he was. And now that we’ve seen each of them without the other, that sounds pretty stupid.

Mighty Vocal People 

In a discussion of how we determine who gets Most-Valuable-Player awards, I argued that the support for Mike Trout was based on the lazy notion that he was the overall best player, rather than best that season, and the award would really go to Mookie Betts. You guessed it, Trout was named MVP. But I will point out that Betts had a better batting average, home run, and RBI numbers than Trout.

Minor Obstacles

I talked about the controversy at the start of Kris Bryant's career, as the Chicago Cubs were waiting a couple of weeks to call him up to the majors, in order to take advantage of a loophole in the rules that would force Bryant to stay with the team an extra year. I then went over a humourous preview of the career ahead of him, in order to ridicule the odd path many major league careers go through.

But his career didn't really go that way. Obviously, I never considered the posibility that he and the Cubs would actually win the World Series. I think I can be forgiven for that. But the rest of the preview was based on him following the money to big market teams. Unfortunately, injuries have curtailed his effectiveness, and he instead signed with the Colorado Rockies, usually one of Major League Baseball's small spenders. That's unfortunate for him, and makes my prediction look silly. However I stand behind the point I was making: That the weird business of baseball makes for odd, circuitous careers, so complaining about a small loophole is a waste of time.

There's No Nation Like Donation

Universities will often go to alumni looking for donations, which has become a little awkward. I'm sure it made sense in my parents' generation, when tuition was low and education was undertaken in a spirit of enlightenment.

But today's grads look at it differently. Obviously, many are held back by the fact that they're asked for a donation while still paying down student debt. But even if debt isn’t holding them back, university plays a different part in our lives now.

Today, it's more of a business proposition.  The university may not be making a profit on education, but it is charging as much as it can while still remaining a sensible value proposition, much a products on the free market are. Tuition is an investment, that — while expensive — will pay off in the long term. Once you’ve paid a huge amount of money as an expensive long term business investment, You’re less likely to think of that institution as a charity.

It would be like if you bought a car, and it's a really nice car, and you're glad you bought it. But then a year later the car company phones you to ask if you'd care to give them more money. It's like, yes, I like the car, but I paid fair market value for it, so I assumed that was the end of the transaction. It’s not something I think about donating to.

There's lots of things that ask for donations today. I mean, Wikipedia is one biggest ones. It's such an unusual institution to begin with: a widely-used resource that doesn't make a profit or get government grants. So I don’t have any automatic assumptions about giving to it.

In sharp contrast to the University situation, Wikipedia is an institution that you've never given money to through payment for services or through taxes. So its donation requests are unusual: usually charitable giving is purely altruistic, given to a service that others — less-fortunate people — will use. It's not too often that you’re asked to donate for your own sake. The closest parallel is a busker, but you generally don’t choose your buskers. Okay, maybe a better parallel would be a museum with a “recommended donation,” which is kind of what the Wikipedia donation request/guilt-trip is.

(To be clear, I’m not comparing Wikipedia to a University education. I’m aware that the latter is necessarily a lot more expensive than the former)

And now, at this time of the rolling year, many institutions are asking for donations. Not just charities, but also open-source software, and public radio & TV. It’s a reminder of how our world has developed a lot of “free” options that nevertheless need to pay the bills, and non-mainstream media tastes will make it more likely you’ll encounter them. It makes me wonder if this is going to be a viable way of keeping things operating in the future: A labour of love that stays afloat with donations. It’s an odd idea, because we think of donations as going to the less fortunate, in a situation where users of the service are in no position to contribute. But now we’re talking about users paying for their own service, but voluntarily, and hoping that the donations from the wealthy or extra-generous will offset those who can’t or won’t contribute. 

Will it work in the long term? I’m skeptical, though some open-source software has been sustained for a while now with a combination of volunteering and semi-self-interested donations from people and corporations. So maybe it can work.