Coldbrook trucker feels ripped off by Tims

Roll Up to Win prize notification not what it seemed

Scott Adams thought it was his lucky day.

On a stop in Alberta last week to grab a coffee at Tim Hortons, the long-haul truck driver from Coldbrook used the Tims app to order a coffee.

He had forgotten about the Roll Up to Win contest.

So Adams was ecstatic when he checked the app later that week to see he had a notification saying he was the winner of a $10,000 American Express prepaid card.

“I immediately started thinking of the bills I could pay off,” he told SaltWire.

“It was a potentially lifechanging moment.”

One sentence in the notification, however, had him wondering.

“Must be verified,” it read. “So I emailed Tim Hortons to ask . . . . how do I verify this and how do I collect my money?”

The email he got back was disappointing.

“They basically said we messed up and here’s a $50 gift card.”

In a form letter, Tim Hortons said that for a few hours that Monday morning a technical error caused an issue for a small number of Roll Up to Win players.

The way the contest works is that for every eligible roll revealed, guests are automatically entered into a daily jackpot. There is one ultimate winner of each day’s prize and that winner is notified by email the following day.

Adams’ roll was entered into the daily jackpot.

“Unfortunately, as part of that entry, you were presented with an incorrect award message for a prize that is not available to be won instantly.”

Essentially, a ticket to win was called a win.

To compensate for the “confusion and disappointment” Tims said it would add a $50 Tims card to his loyalty rewards account.

It left the truck driver with a bad taste for the company.

“I’ve been a loyal Timmies coffee drinker for about 35 years. I plan my stops for the night next to a Tims so I can start my day with one.

“Sometimes I’m drinking about six cups a day,” he said, adding, “I’ve probably paid them more than $10,000 over the years.”

He’d really like to talk to someone from Tims.

“I really don’t think a $50 gift card is enough.”

So far, he’s had no luck reaching a real voice at the company.

If he could get someone on the phone, he said, he’d tell them customer service should be first, and they should pay him and everyone else who got that message.

“I think they should honour that. It’s not like it’s a company that can’t afford it.”

Contest mistakes have happened before, he said, recalling how a friend of his was fired from an Ontario radio station in the 1990s after announcing the grand prize in a contest was $1,000. It was only supposed to be $100.

“They had to honour that $1,000 prize,” he said.

Tim Hortons, in an email to SaltWire, offered no further information on the cause of the technical glitch and would not say whether it would be prepared to offer Adams or others who received the incorrect message anything more in compensation.

“For a few hours on Monday morning, a technical error caused an issue for a small subset of Roll Up to Win players. They were shown an incorrect award message for a prize that is meant to be awarded once per day to one person in our jackpot draw,” the statement said.

“We’re already in contact with some of the impacted guests to express our regret for the disappointment caused by this error.”

On Wednesday, March 8, Adams was travelling through Wyoming, making do with coffee from an American

“They had to honour that $1,000 prize,” Scott Adams

franchise.

He can’t wait to get back to Canada and better coffee. However, he’ll be heading to McDonald’s from now on, he said.

“I don’t know if I’ll ever spend money at that shop again.”

Tims isn’t the only company that made headlines because of contest glitches.

When it comes to the mother of all botched contests, the award could probably go to Pepsi and its number fever contest that ran in the Philippines in 1992.

Because of an error at a bottling plant, 600,000 people thought they had found the winning number for the one million peso jackpot. Riots ensued when they learned there would be no prize.

And an error in an ad for a 1995 Pepsi points contest in the United States that promoted the possibility of a fighter jet for a prize led to a years-long court battle and the Netflix series Pepsi, Where’s My Jet?