Tim’s could clean up with a new contest

Roll Up the Rim has been going on long enough

Tim Hortons has an interesting problem.

This year, the coffee and fastfood giant kicked out more prizes than ever in its regular Roll Up the Rim contest, thinking that, with more prizes, there would automatically be more purchases.

It didn’t happen that way. The CEO of Tim’s parent company, Jose Cil, told a conference call that the increase in prizes, “did not drive the incremental engagement we expected.”

So now, the company is looking at rebooting the contest, perhaps going digital and using a prize app.

It’s probably well past time for that, especially because the contest glorifies using as many disposable cups as you possibly can. Environmentally, it’s indefensible.

Roll Up the Rim has been going on long enough now that it’s spawned its own unique conspiracy theories: ask a Tim’s regular whether the contest is rigged against people who buy coffee in large cups, and you may get an interesting answer about how limited your chances are of winning, particularly in that size. Only ask about the motives for limiting “large” winners if you have some time to spare to hear the whole thing out.

Tim’s may have honestly put out more prizes with the last round of cups, but that’s not what the anecdotal discussion was about the cups. I was told quite seriously by some regulars that the number of prizes that turn up is on a steady decline, regardless of what the company says it was doing. Winning, or not winning, is obviously in the eyes of the beholder.

Face it: rolling up the rim is a maturing lottery, with the same sorts of customer fatigue problems as that grandpa of lottery ticket draws, Lotto-649.

But I have a suggestion for the Tim’s fall reboot, and it’s not entirely a digital one at that.

Instead of putting prizes on the lips of cups, hand out the equivalent of a small, biodegradable Tim’s scratch-and-win ticket.

But not when you buy a cup of coffee.

No.

Hand out a scratch and win for every 10 cardboard Tim’s coffee cups and lids a customer brings in for proper disposal.

And not just your own coffee cups, either; bring back any 10 Tim’s cups, from anywhere (except maybe from the garbage cans in the Tim’s parking lot) and Tim Hortons will give you a shot at a prize.

It could be the coffee cups you have stacked up in your car at the end of the week.

It could be a selection of the Tim’s cups and lids that have been mouldering away on the side of the road for the last year or two, hurled out of the car the moment that hot double-double has been drunk down to a zero-zero.

For the first round of the Clean Up the Rim to Win contest, there’d be lots of prize chits needed; I see a hundred or more Tim’s cups every day on my walk to work. They are left standing and half-full in parking lots; rolling around on the road before being flattened by cars; in hedges and ditches, anywhere the wind finally tires of carrying them forwards.

But, as contests went by, the commoditized cups would slowly disappear; they’d be good for something.

And everyone would win. One of the single most prevalent types of waste in many provinces would start to disappear, Tim Hortons would be able to wrap itself in an environmental flag (as well as its usual hockey-parent blanket), and people might even do the right thing with their waste, even if it was only because they were being bribed with prizes.

Oh, and give a scratch-and-win ticket to anyone bringing their own cup, too.

Sometimes a stick’s not enough — sometimes, carrots are essential, too.

Russell Wangersky’s column appears in 36 SaltWire newspapers and websites in Atlantic Canada. He can be reached at russell.wangersky@thetelegram.com — Twitter: @wangersky.