Some Tim Hortons customers in Atlantic Canada thought they were getting something a little sweeter than a double double, after the coffee giant’s app showed them they’d won a $10,000 pre-paid American Express card as part of its Roll Up To Win contest.
Luc Massé said he and his partner are planning a trip to Ireland for their 25th anniversary, and when he got his first contest cup on March 6, he was over the moon.
“I was excited,” he said. “I took a screenshot and sent it to my wife. That’s when the app crashed.”
Once Massé logged back in, he couldn’t find the prize he’d won just minutes earlier.
“I didn’t quite panic at the time,” he said in an interview Thursday. “It’s great, this never happens to me.”
He waited about a day, but the prize did not show up. He called his local Tim Hortons, who told him about the glitch and said to call the customer service line. Massé waited a few days and got an email from the company.
“It said in his email there had been a glitch that morning and that the winners … were a glitch. It never should have happened. It was an error that it came up. He apologized and offered me $50 Tim Hortons gift card.”
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He said it hit him hard to realize he was not getting that big prize. Massé is long-time Tim Hortons customer and he said he won’t be returning any time soon.
“It left a little sour taste in my mouth, so to speak, and since Monday I haven’t been back to a Tim Hortons yet,” he said.
He wasn’t the only Atlantic Canadian who got the false win.
Sarah Smith, in Nova Scotia, grabs a tea at her local Tim Hortons on her way to work every day. In fact, she worked for the company all through her teenage and college years.
“I did my roll,” she said. “So I took a screenshot after I was screaming for, like, other people at work to come over and make sure I was reading it right. I was like, ‘I can’t believe this.’”
She said she completed the process the app asked of her, including providing her email. It would only be about 24 hours later she’d discover the prize was nothing more than a technical error.
“My husband and I had started making plans to take our family out west,” she said, adding it would be to visit family they don’t see very often.
Smith said $10,000 would have been a life-changing amount of money.
The company offered her a $50 Tim Hortons gift card instead.
“They’re getting every last cent of the $50 back,” she said. “So, essentially, it’s not costing them anything for the emotional roller coaster, you know, that myself and now others were on.”
She said she knows it is not likely she’ll be given the prize money, but the impersonal way the company dealt with the issue has her looking for her tea elsewhere.
“To just have it all ripped away from you,” she said.
Tim Hortons confirmed in an email statement there was a technical error on Monday, “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,” it went on to say.
It added it had been in contact with the customers impacted by the error to express its regret, but did not respond to questions on whether it would honour those prizes.
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