please see attached excel file

As a test, I granted my user dbo permissions on the databases in question and the execution plan matches the 'fast' dbo execution plan.

However, I am reluctant to grant this...

In our environment we have a server of purely static market data. User's will 'pull' from this static data into their own databases on the 'user' server. This...

and yes, I am fully qualifying the name because I'm using a linked server.

The query yields the exact same data results. However the execution plans are different and the time it takes for each user is drastically different.