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Tim Hortons had tried this year to improve the program, after noticing that it wasn’t attracting customers to stores. The chain added more prizes and extended the length of the contest. But it didn’t provide the desired result — and the extra prizes dragged down Tim Hortons’ sales numbers.

“It’s gotten old,” Tim Hortons president Alex Macedo told the Financial Post on Monday. “No one drives the same car, not a lot of people, that they had in 1986 and expects the same results.”

In a quarterly update Monday, the coffee chain reported system-wide sales of US$1.5 billion, down US$61 million compared to the previous year. Comparable sales, an important gauge for success in retail, fell by 0.6 per cent.

It's gotten old Alex Macedo, Tim Hortons president

“Our biggest promotion in a competitive environment didn’t work,” Macedo said. “So that causes us to lose ground.”

Macedo said his team is looking at creating “a really cool app” to bring Roll Up The Rim into the digital age — and a coffee market that has become far more complex and crowded than it was when the contest started.

Asked about whether the promotion would stay on coffee cups, he said he was still trying to figure out “how many rims we’re going to continue to roll up.”

“You’re going to be able to play with it on your phone next year, no doubt,” he said. “I’m promising that without talking to the tech people, but I assure you that’s going to happen.”

“I don’t want people to think, ‘Oh, Roll Up is done.’ It’s not done,” he said. “We’re not going to kill it…. We need to make it exciting again.”