Let me introduce you to some modern Canadian culture

First of all some background:

Tim Hortons is without doubt the largest coffee shop chain in Canada. The chain is named after, who else, but a famous hockey player. Tim opened the first Tim Hortons back in 1964, in Hamilton, Ontario. Fast forward 43 years and you have a 3000 store chain stretching across the US and Canada. To put it in perspective, within a 5 km radius from where I’m sitting right now, there are, without exaggeration, 10 Timmies (as they are popularly referred to).

During the morning every Timmies has a lineup extending to the doors, and drive thru’s with cars extending to the end of the driveways. At school, the students were extremely excited when the federation of students announced the opening of a new Tims on campus. This term I was surprised to see yet another Tims on campus. It’s not unusual to see students run to Timmies between classes to get their morning fix of coffee, many of them sacrificing the first few minutes of the lecture to stand in the long line up.

All that being said, it’s now appropriate to introduce you to the phenomenon that sweeps Canada on a yearly basis. Every year, Tim Hortons introduces their “Rrrol up the rim to win” contest, with prizes ranging from cars to iPod’s. The way it works is that rolling up the rim of a Timmies. Under the rim you’ll see that you should either “Play Again” or that you’ve won something.

Rrrol up the rim dominates conversations at the water cooler. “Have you won anything?”, replaces “Did you hear of the weather we’re getting?” as a conversation starter, and complaints about “I buy a coffee everyday and never win anything ever” which I say all the time, becomes a common complaint among people.

Last year though it didn’t stop there. Tim Hortons was the subject of the evening new across Canada when there was a dispute over who won a car. The dispute started “brewing”, as the CBC put it, when a 10 year old girl in Montreal found a coffee cup in the garbage. She asked her 12 year old friend to help her roll up the rim, only to reveal that this cup was actually the winner of a brand new RAV4. There was a huge dispute between the families over who gets to keep the car, and things got as far as lawyers requiring DNA samples from the cup. Finally Tim Hortons stepped in to give the car to the girl’s family who originally found the cup.

Today I had my fix of Tim Hortons and as you can see here, I have to play again. I’m optimistic, I know I’ll win something other than a cookie someday, a dream that I share with many Canadians every spring.

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