A university student says she was asked to spit in an empty coffee cup for an experiment by a Tim Hortons employee.
On Monday, Toronto Metropolitan University (TMU) student Anna Hoang posted on TikTok about an incident that happened to her at the Tim Hortons located on Dundas and Victoria streets on Aug. 22 at 6:40 p.m.
The student was asked to spit in an empty cup by one of the employees after receiving her coffee order.
“I’m doing this experiment where I collect peoples’ saliva. Can you spit in the cup for me?” Hoang said the employee asked her.
Appalled at the interaction, Hoang threw out her coffee afterwards and called the store to speak with the store supervisor.
The Tim Hortons supervisor said he would look through the tapes and after confirming that he saw the incident on camera, he asked Hoang to find it in her heart to forgive the employee because he’s a teenager and an immigrant.
“It would be really hard on him if other people knew about it. It’s not acceptable, of course, but could you forgive him for this kind of thing?” the supervisor said to Hoang, as seen in a recording of the conversation in her TikTok video.
“When I pushed back, he said he would temporarily suspend him for a week, but I would have no way of finding out if he actually did so or not,” Hoang told Now Toronto on Tuesday.
Hoang also reached out to Tim Hortons’s head office, who told her it would escalate the situation to the franchise owner and then update her.
Others commenting on Hoang’s TikTok said they went through similar experiences at this location.
“The same thing happened to me at that location, two months ago an employee asked me to do that,” one user said.
Ann Reyez, one of the users who also commented on Hoang’s TikTok video, says she had an incident at the same location where one of the employees asked if her hair was real because of her long hair extensions while proceeding to touch her hair.
“I moved my head [because] it was weird and then he asked if he [could] have a piece of it to do some test or experiment. I genuinely thought that he said that because he was joking and wanted to test if my hair was real,” Reyez told Now Toronto on Tuesday.
After Hoang’s TikTok video was posted, commenters posted negative Google reviews on the Tim Hortons location, addressing the poor behaviour of the supervisor and employee but the reviews have since been deleted overnight.
Toronto Police Services says it has not received any reports about the incident.
“We do not have any records of complaints of this nature at that location but we urge anyone that has experienced this type of interaction to report it to police,” TPS Spokesperson Laurie McCann told Now Toronto.
Now Toronto reached out to Tim Hortons but did not hear back in time of publication.
