Well residents, it’s that time of the year. The time when people all over Canada up their doses of caffeine a day in hopes of winning a game that has the hopeful patriots lining up at every Tim Horton’s in the country.
Roll up the Rim is back and it’s already the center of conversations all over Crowsnest Pass. “Have you won yet?” “I won a coffee!”
It’s no lie that Canadians love to play the game with the big red cup.
So what is the big deal with Roll up the Rim? Are we that excited by the one in eight million possibility that under the rim of our coffee cup is one of the forty Toyota Camrys? Or is it just the exaggerated excitement we receive for winning a free coffee that gets our hearts pumping?
Perhaps it all started 27 years ago, back in 1986 when the first ever Roll up The Rim to Win contest was held. It has remained strong and prominent ever since, becoming a favourite game to Canadians nationwide.
Over 30 million prizes are distributed each year through the contest, and in 2008, over 88 per cent of major prizes were redeemed. It’s clear that we don’t forget to play the game but how intensely are we playing the game?
Lets not forget about the two families who fought over the Toyota Rav4 SUV prize, valued at $32,000, in March of 2006, after their daughters found a winning coffee cup in a garbage bin of an elementary school in Montreal.
Lawyers, lawsuits and even a DNA test resulted from that incident, which made national news. All this, over a coffee cup. There have even been several marketing schemes hoping to profit off the contest, the most famous attempt being that of Paul Kind, as seen on Dragon’s Den, who invented a device for rolling rims, sparing your thumbs the hassle of touching the soggy cup you are about to discard. How convenient.
For many people, the months of February and March are depressing time of the year, as it sits firmly between the festive season of Christmas and the sunny prospects of Spring. This is the time of year that we can almost see the shorts, feel the flip flops and taste the ice-cream from Old Dairy, yet we still have to dig out cars out of the snow and trudge through the sludge in between our sunlit daydreams.
Perhaps Roll up the Rim is a small silver lining that makes this dreary time of the year a little less dreary. Or maybe we just really want the truck.
It is a common misconception that the good prizes are hidden in the larger sized cups, as a marketing scheme to encourage consumers to invest more in the game. Upon doing some research, I have found that this is not true, that all the prizes, big and small are divided evenly throughout the cup sizes.
Another common misconception is that Albertans don’t have much of a chance getting the big wins, as the winning cups are in Ontario, as that is where the bulk of Canada’s population is.
False. The winning cups are divided throughout the provinces with a ratio of cups that matches the population of province.
