'Like I got kicked in the teeth': Roll Up To Win glitch angers Tim Hortons customers

Tim Hortons is admitting a “technical error” caused some customers to think they won $10,000 from the coffee giant’s popular Roll Up To Win contest.

A Tillsonburg couple said they got an alert about their big win on Monday, only to later receive an email from Tim Hortons explaining it was a mistake.

Jeremy McDougall posted a screenshot of the notification online saying he won and the subsequent email that followed.

“Complete disappointment, like I got kicked in the teeth or something. I was like, ‘what?,’ said McDougall’s wife Sarah Croft.

McDougall said they offered him a $50 gift card instead.

“I was pretty upset,” McDougall said. “I was not interested in $50 dollar Tim card. I don’t plan to spend any money at Tim Hortons anymore.”

In a statement to CTV News Kitchener, Tim Hortons’ media relations team said the glitch occurred on Monday morning and lasted a few hours.

“A technical error caused an issue for a small subset of Roll Up To Win players,” the statement read.

Tim Hortons said it was an incorrect award message for a prize that is meant to be awarded once per day to one person in the jackpot draw.

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

Many took to social media saying it happened to them as well.

Michael Wallace is an associate professor at the University Of Waterloo who specializes in statistics and knows a thing or two about the contest.

“Last term I was teaching my students about this contest about basically the statistical experiments that I was doing,” explained Wallace.

His experiments in 2020 and 2022 led him to crack the code of the app. He won in 94 spins with about a 98 per cent win rate.

Wallace said he wasn’t exactly shocked that a technical error like this happened after Tim Hortons switched the contest to a digital format in 2020.

“This is a cautionary tale, in the things that can go awry when you switch things to digital platforms,” Wallace said.

He warns customers to always read the fine print.

“There was a big asterisk that said ‘prize to be verified’. Certainly if you go and read these rules they are perfectly within their rights within how the game is structured in order to not to be honouring these prizes. But at the same time, most people aren’t like me and don’t spend hours reading the rules really carefully,” he admitted.

Wallace said, statistically speaking, when something seems too good to be true there’s a chance that it is.

“There’s one person in the whole country that will get the $10,000 prize. So you maybe don’t need a statistician to tell you that your odds of being that one person are very, very small,” Wallace said.