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Charlatan · 04-21-2008, 03:23 PM

Saw this story and thought it was relevant... Interesting that everyone seems to be winning less. Could Tim's have reduced the number of prizes?

LINK

Quote:

Coffee junkies say it's a lean 'Roll Up the Rim' season

PATRICK WHITE

From Wednesday's Globe and Mail

April 16, 2008 at 2:25 AM EDT

'Tis the season of our national lament.

We gripe, we caterwaul, but as another cycle of one of our dearest national pastimes peters out, we resign ourselves to the age-old losers' chorus of “Maybe next year.”

Yes, another season of Tim Hortons' Roll Up the Rim to Win promotion is at an end, though the promotion's finale has not come without protest. Everywhere, double-double drinkers are grumbling about their lack of wins, all united by one cold, bilingual line: “Please Play Again/Réessayez s.v.p.” Bloggers, construction workers, even radio personalities have noted long slumps.

At a Tim Hortons in downtown Toronto yesterday, morning caffeine imbibers streamed out the doors with dispositions as bitter as their joe. “I can't believe it's over already,” said Trevor Walcott, a three-a-day coffee drinker clutching a burgundy cup rather than one of the bright-red contest cups in which he'd invested so much hope over the past two months. “I've won three free coffees the whole time. Last year, I won like seven or eight times.”
Disappointed Tim Hortons patrons have begun cooking up theories to explain why they aren’t winning. Deborah Baic/The Globe and Mail

Disappointed Tim Hortons patrons have begun cooking up theories to explain why they aren’t winning. (Deborah Baic/The Globe and Mail)
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* What's your Tims experience been like this round of Roll Up the Rim to Win?

Behind him walked University of Toronto student Breanna Costelloe. “I'm really upset,” she said, over a song pumping through her iPod. “I drink two or three Tims a day and won a single coffee this time around. My mom says she's had the same luck.”

For five of the eight weeks that Tim Hortons ran the promotion, CBC host Stuart McLean and his 12-member tour bus drove from Fort St. John, B.C., to Fargo, N.D., perhaps braking for more Hortons outlets than any other vehicle on the road during that period.

“We had logged about 8,000 kilometres on the Vinyl Cafe tour bus,” Mr. McLean, who doesn't drink coffee, later reflected on his show. “[We] made some new friends and rolled up enough rims to make you wonder if anyone ever wins anything.”

More devoted coffee drinkers have taken to tracking their sagging fortunes like a trader watching stocks.

Cory Comerford, a telecommunications worker in St. John's, was so excited about his Roll Up the Rim prospects this season that he started a blog, rolluptherimtowin2008.blogspot.com, to monitor his winnings. After a 29-cup losing streak, he briefly stopped posting. The slump reached 35 cups before he won on a cup his brother bought.

“It was a definite rut,” says Mr. Comerford, who normally drinks three double-singles a week, but bumps his intake to one a day during Roll Up the Rim season. “But everyone's reporting lower winnings this year.”

And that's not just a lazy estimate. Mr. Comerford and several co-workers have posted all their cup counts on a whiteboard at work. Their win ratio stands at about one in 12, well off the one in nine that Tim Hortons advertises.

Mr. Comerford has taken his penchant for math and caffeine even further, working out the odds of winning the grand prize Toyota Matrix in each province on a complex spreadsheet.

“If you're in Quebec, you have the best chance of winning,” he says. That's based on calculations he made of the prize disbursements that Tim Horton details in a rules and regulations document. “Ontario, on the other hand, kind of gets the shaft.”

Concerned Tims fans have been quick to finger culprits.

“I've heard they're sending more of the big prizes to the States,” says Mr. Walcott.

Some patrons in Atlantic Canada suspect Hortons workers of stealing winning cups after St. John's resident Bernard Delaney was quoted in local papers insisting that he saw tooth marks on one of his rims in March.

“It would certainly account for the drop,” says Mr. Comerford.

Tim Hortons has worked to discredit these homespun theories. Every Roll Up the Rim season it hires a professional contest company to ensure the odds of winning remain at one in nine, just as they have for previous promotions. Rumours of regional prize disparities are “Not true,” according to company spokeswoman Rachel Douglas.

Not everyone has endured the great doughnut drought of 2008. Calgarian Jonathan Lin has graphed winnings far ahead of the company odds at linisus.com/tim-hortons-roll-up-the-rim. And one Toronto patron reported Tuesday winning “on every second cup.”

Beyond those few examples of success, there may still be hope, however faint. Even though many locations across the country are nearly out of contest cups, five cars and 29 boats remain unclaimed, according to Ms. Douglas, who offered somewhat hollow words of encouragement for desperate prize-seekers: “Keep r-r-rolling!”