You’ve always got time for Tim Hortins?

For this article for The Grid about just how many Starbucks, Second Cup, Timothy’s, Country Style, and Coffee Time locations there are in Toronto (a lot!), I spent a half-day digging through an Excel spreadsheet of all of Toronto’s active business licences. Because operators fill out the licence applications themselves, typos sometimes make their way onto a business licence, a problem that’s probably never more prevalent and certainly never more obvious than with franchises. (Does every McDonald’s owner need to know how to spell or punctuate McDonald’s if they’re not making the signage or printing the menus themselves?) It doesn’t make searching through licensing data to actually count how many different locations Starbucks has easy, but it does make it a little more fun.

Here are some of the businesses that I just barely didn’t miss, all of them legitimate franchisees: