Tim Hortons says 'technical errors' falsely told people they won $55K boat in Roll Up To Win promo
Tim Hortons says 'technical errors' falsely told people they won $55K boat in Roll Up To Win promo
Too fucking bad.
Give them the boat and QA your fucking code next time.
Large corporations are happy to sell contacts like this to the lowest bidder - the reason those contractors are so cheap is because they occasionally make big fucking mistakes.
Pay for quality or pay the price when your cheap ass gets fucked.
More than just Air Canada, companies need to be held accountable to what their bad apps and systems tell people.
Here's just an apropos of that, but one of the earlier companies I worked at in Canada was a Software Consultancy, like over 15 years ago.
Companies would and did reach out for things like a competition to enter and we'd have to code it up. The typical way it "used" to work was the big shots get a lot of money and they get a bunch of fresh out of UofT or UW grads to work hard to get it done.
Well, guess what, they screwed the pooch on this competition. For some reason, they rejected or didn't collect ANY of the email submissions that were valid. So they couldn't even pick a valid email to declare the winner. The company was furious and said, this isn't our problem and we're not going to manufacture a winner. So what my/that company did was it did log errors for invalid emails. They basically chose a winner from people that wrote invalid email addresses. I can't remember but it was something like person@example.co.m. Why did they not do client-side and just relied on server-side? I don't know. I wasn't directly on the project. Anyways, they gave the prize to someone that did a typo.
Uh uh no way. You either insure against fuckup payouts or you eat it.
2026: [Business] says ‘technical errors’ falsely told all participants that they lost in [marketing promo], no prizes handed out again this year.
Second year in a row they did this. Last year they told a bunch of people they'd won ten grand.
I don't recall any of these errors happening when you just had to actually roll of the rim of your cup.
But they decided to go digital so they can steal customer data and force people to create unnecessary accounts and download their app.
email on Wednesday morning from Tim Hortons that recapped all the prizes he won this year and it included one he didn't recognize: a 2024 Tracker Targa 18 WT boat and trailer, which retails for $39,995 US (about $55,000 Cdn) — the only one available to participants.
A recap email. This is going to be fun in court.
I think I listened to a podcast about a kid who won some huge shit this way in the 90s. From Pepsi. Courts ruled against them. I wanna say fighter jet. I might be wrong.
These people should get paid. They didn’t make the mistake.
It was a fighter jet, but the crux of thing was that while they advertised "hey get enough tickets, and you can get something on our ticket store, mike this military jet for xxx tickets", the military jet was not in the store (obviously). The guy accumulated enough tickets to afford the price that was in the ad, then sued to hold Pepsi accountable for their advertisements.
IIRC he lost, because the judge went "yeah you can clearly see it's meant as an exaggeration bye"
This is the best summary I could come up with:
A technical error by Tim Hortons led coffee drinkers across Canada to falsely believe they had won a $55,000 boat as part of the franchise's Roll Up To Win promotion.
Darren Stewart-Jones of Hamilton said he opened an email on Wednesday morning from Tim Hortons that recapped all the prizes he won this year and it included one he didn't recognize: a 2024 Tracker Targa 18 WT boat and trailer, which retails for $39,995 US (about $55,000 Cdn) — the only one available to participants.
Alanna O'Hoski of Hamilton said she received the email and spent part of the day on hold waiting for an answer from Tim Hortons.
"We apologize for the frustration this has caused and for not living up to our high standards of providing an exceptional guest experience," read the letter, which Tim Hortons shared with CBC.
"This is a repeated pattern of behaviour and simply saying it's a technical issue just goes to show Tim Hortons didn't do its due diligence," Rivet said.
After the last mishap, Hamed Aghakhani, associate professor of marketing at Dalhousie University's Rowe School of Business, told CBC News the coffee chain's terms and conditions likely protect the company in case of an issue like this.
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