Who invented roll up the rim

It worked, so he started thinking of a name for the contest. At first, he said, customers were skeptical that stores would actually hand over prizes. So Buist said Tim Hortons printed the winners on boards and hung them in stores.

They displayed the prizes in stores too, parking cars outside and hanging bikes from the store ceiling. Despite his qualms with the cup, Buist was adamant that the act of rolling up the rim must survive the transition to digital. Sign up to receive the daily top stories from the Financial Post, a division of Postmedia Network Inc. A welcome email is on its way.

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The page you are looking at will not be updated. It also created an opportunity to shift the odds heavily in your favour. Under the old format, the mechanics of the game were simple. Tim Hortons would print millions of promotional cups and about one out of every six cups had a prize under its paper rim. Stores would then sell the cups until supplies ran out. If sales were unexpectedly high, the cups would simply run out sooner.

If sales were low, the game would last a little longer. Either way, the number of prizes and the number of cups given out — the numerator and denominator of our probability equation — were fixed. This year, the digital game changed all that.

These could be rolled at any time by tapping a virtual coffee cup on the app. It depended on their actual sales during the four-week contest period. The number of prizes the numerator was still fixed, but the number of entries the denominator was out of their hands.

They had to find a new way to distribute the prizes. The solution, as I wrote about before the start of the contest , meant Roll up the Rim became a bit like a slot machine. If you were the first player to tap your app during that timeframe, you won the prize. Tim Hortons could then distribute all the advertised prizes across the contest period and every single one — at least in theory — could be won.

With some of these winning timeframes as short as 0. Anticipating this, Tim Hortons included a rule where any unclaimed prizes were rolled over to another day of the contest, right up until the final day. Although the in-store contest ended April 7, players had an additional two weeks to use their digital rolls. This new game format meant your odds of winning depended not only on how many digital rolls you earned, but also how many others were playing.

If sales were low, then fewer people would play — and more of those winning timeframes would pass without the prize being claimed.