v36.6: Where is my Timmy's?

Good morning folks,

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Another day, another dollar or so the saying goes.  Since we've moved I have hardly had a single cup of Tim Horton's coffee to drink.  In fact, I haven't had a single drop of Tim Horton's coffee all week.  It isn't because I've been cutting back on my coffee, it is more because there isn't a convenient Tim Horton's between my new place and the office.  I've been a loyal Tim Horton's drinker for a long time (16ish years now) and it feels strange not to have that Tim Horton's coffee first thing in the morning.

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But I digress.  Coffee is coffee right?  Instead of finding a Tim Horton's close by that I could get a coffee from, I decided to stop at a local gas station near my place and pick up my coffee from there every morning.  It isn't the same thing, but it is coffee and it gets the job done.  So here I sit, well before 8AM in the morning writing this musing over bitter gas station coffee.

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One could spend many hours writing about coffee and I believe I've written about it in the past.  You could talk about the origins of coffee and how it was first discovered to when it was first used as a drink to the multi-billion dollars in revenue coffee beans (as a whole) bring in for many companies around the world.  Tim Horton's alone generated 2.24 billion dollars of revenue last year (2009).  Granted they sell more than just coffee but for a relatively small coffee shop like that, 2.24 billion dollars is a LOT of money.  When you look at larger chains like Dunkin Donuts who generated 5.5 billion dollars last year, it is not hard to see that the "coffee" business is making a lot of money.  While I'm at it, I should also point out that Starbucks generated 9.77 billions dollars of revenue last year.  You add that all up and you're looking at 3 companies generating over 17.5 billions dollars of revenue in 2009; supposedly one of the hardest economic years in a long time.  Interesting.

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So there is money to be made in selling coffee, perhaps I'm in the wrong line of work.  Of course there is a huge difference from begin the person serving the coffee and the person running the show.  At the end of the day, it is all about economics and business sense.  These companies didn't start out huge and they only got to where they are today because of hard work and smart business sense.  Something I know little about :)

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Anyway folks, I'm off for now to see if I can get some work done today.  I'm doing performance reviews this afternoon so hopefully those go well and I can be in a good mood this evening.  I hope everyone has a great day today and if you have some time, check out some of the more famous coffee chains you can think of and see what kind of revenues they're generating.  I would be a bit surprised if you tallied it all up the total revenue of all of these chains is over 100 billion dollars; and don't even get me started on fast food chains :)

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Cheers,

Al