Under normal times, February would be Roll Up The Rim To Win month at Tim Hortons. But February is here, and the game is nowhere to be found.
Due to COVID-19, the 2020 game was delayed to March and was a digital-only game. However, the 2020 game barely got started at all due to a poor 2019 performance. In 2019, sales were down 0.4% in Canada and 0.6% worldwide, and we can only expect that it was down even more in 2020 due to stay-at-home initiatives across Canada.
The 2020 digital game algorithm was also flawed… A statistician from Waterloo discovered (by reading the official rules) that digital prizes are handed out when a player does a digital roll at an exact randomly determined time (up to the millisecond). If no one does a digital roll during that exact time, the prize is carried over to another random time the next day… and so on, and so on, until the prize is won.
Assuming that 2020 would have fewer sales and fewer players, the statistician concluded that there would be a high chance that many of those prizes will continue to roll over to the last day of the contest. So the statistician saved all his rolls and woke up at 5:00am on the final day… his hunch paid off. Out of 96 saved rolls, he only lost twice! He didn’t get any of the big prizes, but did win 67 coffees and 27 doughnuts.
Tim Hortons has not made an official announcement regarding the 2021 game… but if it does happen, expect it to show up early March.
