Tim Hortons and Mastercard

While we were on the honeymoon, we did a lot of driving. 4500km worth of driving around the Maritimes of Canada in 2 weeks. Add in the 4 hour time change and we were consuming a lot of caffeinated beverages.

There weren't too many Starbucks out there (we saw one in downtown Halifax and one in the airport on the whole trip), so we were stopping at Tim Hortons to get our fix.

Out of the 25-30 different Tim Hortons that we stopped at, I'd say that roughly 50-60% of them only accepted Mastercard or cash. No debit, no Visa. When we hit the first one like this, I thought, "must be a small town thing." We proceeded to look under the car floor mats and anywhere else to find change as we didn't have any cash at that point.

I got frustrated as we had to pay cash for more and more of our double doubles. When you're zipping around tiny fishing villages, it's not always easy to find your bank.

I had a hunch that the two companies had a deal of some sort. As it turns out, Mastercard and Tim Hortons are promoting the PayPass stuff. I guess nobody wants to use proximity card credit cards, so they have to force people to use them.

I can understand not taking Visa, but debit is too far. Tim Hortons undid one of the greatest conveniences that Canada has had for a couple of decades: Internac. I'm back on the West Coast now and I'll be voting with my dollars.