Week of April 29, 2004, Issue #445
COVER
The Secret Of Rim
by Chris Wangler
Then Mrs. Bucket said gently, “You mustn’t be too disappointed, my darling, if you don’t find what you’re looking for underneath that wrapper. You really can’t expect to be as lucky as all that.”
“She’s quite right,” Mr. Bucket said.
Charlie didn’t say anything.
—Roald Dahl, Charlie and the Chocolate Factory
And then there were none. Last weekend, thousands of Edmontonians pulled up to Tim Hortons and received an unexpected shock. Those coveted “Roll Up the Rim to Win” cups, which had given some of us reason to live over the last two months, were all but gone. A cold wind seemed to blow over the city.
This year’s contest, which coincides with the company’s 40th anniversary, was bigger than ever. More than 24 million prizes were up for grabs, including GMC trucks, Panasonic plasma TVs, Schwinn bikes, $1,000 cash prizes and, of course, the customary coffee, donuts, cookies and muffins. Winning tabs can be redeemed until May 30.
While the contest lasted, it was a doozy. During peak hours, drive-thru queues snaked around the parking lots, blocking parked cars. The lines inside, rivaling anything from the former Soviet bloc, often spilled out into the Edmonton spring. In a city where drive-thru rage is common, customers showed almost monastical patience. It confirmed, rather eerily, one of the company’s most popular slogans: “You’ve always got time for Tim Hortons.”
I am a hardened addict; in place of a junkie’s tracks, I have a brown tongue. Since the Roll Up the Rim contest began on March 1, I purchased more than 90 large coffees, far in excess of my normal consumption rate. In total I won five donuts, two muffins and one cookie. That means I spent more than $100, often on coffee I didn’t want, to win about seven dollars’ worth of loot. As of this writing, I’ve cashed in only two of the winning tabs.
How did this happen? The official explanation is that I’ve been hooked on RUTR since my parents won a Bunn coffeemaker back in the mid-’90s. The unofficial explanation is that I am an idiot. I knowingly disregarded the odds, which I understood from the outset, expecting to win prizes I didn’t actually want. In fact, I don’t even know what a plasma TV is. It sounds like a specialty channel for hematologists. Most regrettably, I forsook my favorite coffee brand, Java Jive, for the duration of the contest, thus blowing my chances with one of the hot chicks who works there.
So what leads to contest addiction? Many factors.
(1) Brilliant concept and marketing. The story behind the contest is told by Ron Buist, Tim Hortons’ former marketing director, in Tales from Under the Rim: The Marketing of Tim Hortons (Goose Lane Editions, 2003).
It all began one fateful day in September 1985, when Buist met with sales reps from Lily Cup. On a sheet of uncut cups, he noticed white margins at the top and bottom. After learning that the manufacturer’s name and technical information were printed in the bottom margin, he asked if something could be printed (such as PLEASE PLAY AGAIN) on the top margin. The Lily people said yes, and the rest is history.
The contest has grown exponentially since the first contest in 1986. This year, the total retail value of all the RUTR cups, which come in medium, large and extra large, is around $285 million; the total value of the prizes, according to the official rules, is about $28 million.
Customers who win feel rewarded for drinking the company’s coffee. And unlike other contests, which require contestants to mail in their winning entries, winners can instantly redeem most of the prizes at a local shop. Finally, the bigger prizes are carefully selected to reflect what a broad spectrum of men and women truly want.
(2) Misconceptions about the odds and prizes. It states on the cup, in minuscule print that everyone reads, that “Odds of winning a prize 1 in 9.” This means the odds of winning a food prize, such as a donut, muffin, cookie or coffee. (Most of these items, incidentally, are worth less than the coffee.) The odds of winning a big prize—basically quite slim—are clearly stated in the official rules on the company’s website.
But the staggering number of prizes gives some participants the notion that the odds of winning a major prize, and not just another crumbly cookie, are much higher than they really are. Take Laura Peters, a gardening writer who ordinarily drinks tea and very rarely goes to Tim Hortons. Like many Canadians, she buys eight or nine coffees during the contest because it’s fun and easy to win. But while she’s generally very sharp about contest probabilities, her ideas about the RUTR odds are not exactly accurate. “There’s almost 25 million winning cups,” she says. “Obviously there’s about twice as many non-winning cups.”
Well, not really. One of the key statistics not provided on the cup or in the rules is the number of cups total, 220 million (totaling about 84.5 million litres of coffee). This means there are almost 10 times as many losing cups as winners.
(3) Urban legends. In spite of its growing size (2,300 stores in Canada and 185 in the U.S.), Tim Hortons has always been a community business, based on the concept of the local coffee shop. The spirited Kaffeeklatsch around contest time occasionally creates fantastic yarns about unlikely heroes. Not all of them are true.
I heard two while researching this story, one from Kelowna and one from Edmonton. Both are basically the same. The local one was related to me by a manager at one of the Edmonton Tim Hortons. She said that her husband knew a guy who found a cup blowing around outside the Kingsway branch. He grabbed it, rolled it up and won a cool $1,000. Is it true? Perhaps it doesn’t matter. The Frank Capra-esque fantasy that a hapless bum might get lucky appeals to all of us, especially we who “never win anything.”
For a classic case from literature, consider Charlie Bucket from Charlie and the Chocolate Factory, which every RUTR addict should read. More than anything, the penniless kid wants to find the last Golden Ticket in a Wonka candy bar. The prize is a tour of Mr. Wonka’s never-before-seen chocolate factory. Near the end of the contest, by chance, Charlie spots a dollar bill hidden under some snow in a gutter. He grabs it and buys two Willy Wonka bars. Wham, he finds the last Golden Ticket.
(4) The cruel irony of a fair contest that you just can’t beat. Like Shirley Jackson’s “The Lottery.” If you’re one of those whiners who’s convinced that you win less each year, stop your kvetching. According to Buist, it probably seems like you never win because you, and millions of others, simply play more often and therefore see more of those disappointing “PLEASE PLAY AGAIN” rims. What’s more, he maintains that the one-in-nine odds have remained constant since the first contest in 1986.
As for the idea, common among some conspiracy theorists, that only a fraction of the major prizes are actually claimed, the opposite is true. “The prize claim rate is high, about 90 per cent or higher,” says Greg Skinner, a corporate communications officer for Tim Donut Ltd. at the headquarters in Oakville, Ontario. “It’s one of the highest percentages in Canada for similar contests.” The figures for last year’s contest (and those before) bear this out; 29 out of 30 SUVs won, 456 out of 500 cash prizes and so forth.
For the most part, people are happy to play the contest, win or lose. “It’s fun, it’s just kind of fun,” says Laura Peters. “You get a cup of coffee for little more than a buck and you have a chance to win something big—or small. It’s exciting winning anything. I’m jumping up and down in my cubicle because I won a donut.”
But if you are an addict, like me, you may need help. In my case, I hope it will come in the form of Krispy Kreme Doughnuts—the methadone to my Tim Hortons heroin. The North Carolina-based company opened its first Alberta store in Calgary at the end of March. At the end of the summer, it will add another link to its chain in South Edmonton Common, adjacent to IKEA. More to the point, there’s no plans for a rim-rolling contest.
Now that I’m in rehab, I feel that I’ve forgotten what brought me to Tim Hortons in the first place: the donuts. I’ll never forget the day, in August 1999, when I discovered a tray of peanut crunch donuts in a White Rock Tim Hortons. Nearly hunted to extinction for its association with the peanut allergy of the mid-’90s, it was the best donut the company ever made. I bought every single one, certain I would never see other specimens. The discovery, in a mass corporate scenario, of something special, something rare, was much more fulfilling than any prize in a stupid contest. V
I’m not one for “heroes”—when I’m asked questions like “Who is the greatest Canadian?” or “Who do you most admire?” I mostly scrunch up my nose and grumpily retort that I don’t understand the question. Admire for what? Discovering insulin? Playing hockey? Getting cancer and running along the Trans Canada Highway? It all depends on the context.
Within the context of politics and activism, however, I suppose I’d consider Svend Robinson the object of my top-shelf admiration. Robinson is one of those rare activists who understands that while most politics happen outside parliaments and legislatures, we can still accomplish a lot inside those buildings, and forcing a little light into those structures built on hierarchy and exclusion is necessary work. And because a good bit of my own activism has occurred within the partisan left, I have come to know Robinson as a real person—he never played the bullshit, small-talk politician game with me.
But when he was here in January, he seemed tired and even less inclined to rhetoric and speechifying—his public engagements were less passionate than I had remembered. In conversation, he was less measured, and I suppose a little less political about people “not on our side”; he was more blunt, pessimistic and resigned than one would expect from a man who has a reputation as not just a first-class radical, but also an able parliamentarian. He seemed more human, I suppose—more fragile and vulnerable.
We’ve all got crazy stress in our lives, but Robinson must have been working under an unusual amount of pressure. For 25 years, he’s been the go-to guy in Parliament for so many of us interested in a better world, and I always knew him as someone who responded to all takers with the most beautiful humanity. And I guess that’s what showed through two weeks ago when he “snapped” and took a ring. There are so many ways we hide our shortcomings and all the things that suck about us—the dark corners of our humanity. Some people drink or gamble; others rage against inequality, unfettered capitalism and privilege and then go to an auction and put something in their pocket that perfectly symbolizes what they’ve spent their lives fighting against.
I’ve always been keenly aware of the fragility of the left. Groups come together and fall apart, relationships between activists are transitory and rarely based on real friendship, entire movements dissipate over time, leftist political parties come to power and buckle to the demands of the capitalists. We are always in the process of breaking down, picking up the pieces and reconstituting. But what’s become clear to me in the two months since Tooker Gomberg died and Svend Robinson left politics is that the people who are doing the work are just as broken and fragile as the movement.
Further, our penchant for “heroes”—which I think might just be our desire for someone else to do the work for us—means there’s an enormous amount of pressure on the few people doing amazing work in the name of justice and equality. That, obviously, is not fair, and leads to way too many expectations for anyone to handle.
If there’s a lesson in all this mess of letdowns and breakdowns, it’s that we must all take up our share of the work, take care of each other while we do it and take some of the burden off our “heroes.” V