By KARENA WALTER Local News
- Saturday, March 18, 2006 @ 01:00
There are pie
charts, line graphs and Excel programs on the Internet
detailing people’s coffee purchases like a company’s strategy
report.
Some people take Roll Up the Rim very
seriously.
But if you want to increase your chances of
winning a truck, buy a medium and don’t overdo it with the
orders.
“It’s like going to the casino. The more you
gamble, you’re increasing the chances of winning. But at the
same time, you’ll be losing much more money much faster,” says
John Yuen, a statistics professor at Brock
University.
Yuen has used Roll Up the Rim to
demonstrate probability concepts in his statistics
class.
Across the country, the Tim Hortons contest has
spawned a whole new pastime of tracking coffee consumption and
crunching numbers. Embraced and griped about, customers’ wins
and losses are popular discussions on blogs across the
country. People know how many cups they’ve purchased and how
many rims have invited them to “please play again.”
Like “Lindsey” on niagaramoms.com, who admits doubling
her coffee and smoothie intake during the contest to increase
her winnings. “And the only thing I have won, you ask? A
freakin’ donut,” she posted.
Outside the downtown St.
Catharines Tim Hortons Thursday, tea
drinkers Jackie Vanderbeek and Melissa Adshead mused they
hadn’t won yet as they took an order back to Telespectrum, the
call centre where they work.
“I had at least 30 since
the Roll Up the Rim has been going. Nothing,” said Adshead,
who always chooses large twice a day. “We don’t know of any
winners. It gets around up there so if anyone got anything
good, we’d know.”
Others are forgoing word of mouth
and turning to sophisticated tracking methods.
“I have
decided to keep a spreadsheet for the length of the contest to
see if I am lucky, unlucky or average,” writes “rekounas” on
one website.
So can buying a certain size coffee
increase your chances for winning? Or is that just another
urban legend like the one a few years back about the print
colour on winning cups being slightly lighter?
Yuen
said you can add up numbers provided on the Tim Hortons
website to try to increase your chances.
Although the
company is giving away 30 trucks, eight are in western and
southern Ontario. Of those eight, four are in large cups,
three in medium and one in an extra-large.
“Definitely, the medium is the one you should go for,”
Yuen said. That’s because even though there is one more
winning large cup, there are almost 20 million more large cups
in circulation.
Your chance of winning with a medium
cup is one in 9.28 million in this area. With large, the
chance is one in 11.75 million and your worst chances are with
the extra large, at one in 15.95 million.
But Yuen
cautions people not to over-drink. Customers obtain a certain
overall discount from their purchases when they win something.
If you buy 100 coffees and win four doughnuts, you can
subtract the doughnut prices from the coffees to find out your
percentage discount. But if you buy a lot more coffee than
normal, you are spending money unnecessarily, he said.
And no one should expect a discount will ever
materialize if they buy a certain number of cups.
“Questions like that can be answered in a probability
sense,” Yuen said “But they are all probability questions
because you never know until you actually go buy those
coffees.”
Alex Wiebe, a software developer in Winnipeg,
has taken a unique yet complex approach to the contest. He’s
comparing his Roll Up the Rim wins with the Super-7 lottery
and the stock market to see where the best chances are. He
randomly picks a stock each day and invests a fictitious $1 in
it and sees how well his portfolio does.
“So far I’m
doing better with the Super-7 lottery than with the Tim
Hortons coffee and as expected, the stocks are at least
holding their value,” he told The Standard by e-mail.
“Regardless of my current winning/losing streak though, each
cup still only has a one in nine chance of winning anything,
the lottery is one in seven and the stocks don’t matter
because it is not real money. But I’m having fun.”
Tim
Hortons spokesman Greg Skinner said he doesn’t have an
insider’s secret for winning a prize. Cups are distributed by
region, but they don’t know which stores will win, he said.
Two trucks have been won in Ontario so far, but Skinner hasn’t
been told from which contest area or which size cups they were
because winners pull their rims off.
“I think it’s
just so popular and people love playing. There’s no magic
secret,” he said. “It’s all totally random.”
Skinner
said the contest has a 90 per cent redemption rate in the
grand prizes, so most people are rolling their rims and
collecting on them.
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