Tuesday, April 08, 2008

Now then

(I promise I will have a substantive post soon...I'm thinking about lots of hard questions right now - related to academia, even - but they're not finding their way onto the page, perhaps because of the time of year...last week of classes.)

This week's question/rant (which isn't going to mean much to those of you who are not Canadian, I'm afraid):

Why the hell does Tim Hortons not figure out some more sustainable way of rolling up the rim??? I.e. one that doesn't encourage people to get more and more takeout cups?? This is probably going to involve changing the contest from rolling up the rim on a cup to something else, but we're - most of us - adults; we can handle it.

I ask myself this question every time I go to the Tim's on campus with my steel mug, and they try to give me a cup so that I can roll up the rim to win. When the whole point of bringing one's own mug is so that one doesn't have to have a cup! Every time, I say no, with the knowledge that I could be turning away the cup that will win me a car...or a cash prize...or another cup of tea. Seriously. This bugs the shit out of me. People will have no incentive to think about bringing their own cup for their eighteen cups of Tim's coffee a day, if they're not going to get a chance to roll up the rim. Agh.

I even think they could make it a campaign, to change the format of this game to some kind of little game token or something...and people would jump right on the bandwagon, over-estimating the importance of their bringing their own mugs, thinking they were saving the world.

So there.

2 comments:

PG said...

I hear ya. I feel this way about coffee shops in general. Why not provide more incentive to customers to not use disposable cups?

Plus, Tim Hortons, in particular, doubles up their coffee cups because one is too thin and will be too hot to carry. Is it really more economical for them to double up their cups than to provide one cup that doesn't get too hot?

Pantagruelle said...

Hear, hear! I am with you on finding a new way to roll up the rim. Why not just have stickers on the cup that peel off? And for those who bring their own cup, give them a non-transparent sticker they can unpeal too? And better yet, why not make the odds of winning a prize better on the stickers handed out to people who bring their mugs and worse for those who take a paper cup?

I'm with you on the double cup thing too, which annoys the hell out of me. Why can't they provide cup-holders made out of recycled cardboard the way Starbucks and Second Cup do? One of the non-Tims coffee places on my campus doesn't have cup holders and tries to give everyone a double cup. I always put the second cup back on the counter before I walk away so they use it for someone else. And I carry my own cup-holder in a pocket of my back-pack and reuse it every day. I know it's not as good as carrying my own mug around, but at least carrying a cup-holder is better than accepting a doubled-up cup.