McDonald’s 2015 Monopoly is 5 percent less winning

Fans of the McDonald’s Canada Monopoly promotion may notice that this year’s sticker contest, which begins today (October 13) and runs until November 16, is a bit less “a-peeling” than in previous years.

To put it bluntly, customers will have to buy more to win less.

This 2015 iteration is branded “Monopoly Coast to Coast” and is down to a 1-in-5 chance to win, which marks a 5 percent reduction in a customer’s overall chance of winning anything. Up until 2014 and going back as far as I can recall, the McDonald’s Canada Monopoly Contest has boasted a 1-in-4 (25 percent) chance to win.

And for the next month (or until the Monopoly coffee cups run out), there will be no free McCafe coffee card stickers on any coffee cup size, not even “small”, which is the discounted Seniors’ size and which isn’t even getting Monopoly stickers (poor seniors is right!).

Families monopolize the prizes this year

Careful, you could be throwing away a rare “Chateau Frontenac” piece!

McDonald’s the world over use the Monopoly promotion to strengthen the brand loyalty of existing customers and to bring in new customers. And, by placing the game stickers on the larger portion sizes and more expensive menu items, all customers are driven to “upsize” their orders

This year’s Monopoly contest is also trying to increase traffic into McDonald’s Canada restaurants one entire family at a time.

The promotional bumf claims that “every family in Canada could win a prize” this year (based on the Statistics Canada 2011 Census of Population, which counted 9,389,700 census families).

And all the major signature prizes (aside from the basic cash and food prizes) have been chosen to appeal especially to families — Jeeps Renegades, snowmobiles, BMX bicycles, vacation trips, family fishing equipment packages, and computer game and gaming console instant prizes.

One can only wonder if the ten 2015 Jeep Renegade Sport vehicles to be won are like the 7800-some 2015 models of the Renegade being recalled because they can potentially be remotely hacked through their computerized entertainment system. And if they are, might “junior” be able to hack their parents’ Renegade using one of the instant win Xbox One consoles?

That would be fun for the whole family!

A sorry excuse for Canadian rebranding

You know, this does look a little like Pierre Trudeau, now that I think about it.

In this year’s “Monopoly Coast to Coast”, most of the game board squares have been Canadian-ized. “Boardwalk” and “Park Place”, for example, have been renamed “Fairmont le Chateau Frontenac” and “Niagara Falls”.

This nationalistic rebranding is cautiously bland though. “Waterworks” becomes simply “Hydro” and the standard Monopoly railroads are replaced with generic place-named airports like “Vancouver Airport” instead of “YVR” and “Toronto Airport” rather than “Pearson International”.

While I can see how some people in Alberta might better-tolerate “Montreal Airport” than “Pierre Elliott Trudeau International Airport”, couldn’t the Monopoly jail at least have been renamed after a known Canadian penitentiary, such as “Matsqui”, a notable medium-security federal prison in friendly Abbotsford, B.C.?

The return of the mysterious Snapfish

One of the more puzzling of the 14 million prizes to be won.

The perennial head-scratcher Snapfish returns for another year to spawn even more confusion. Whole schools of the instant win prize are waiting to be peeled and puzzled over by McDonald’s customers.

In a nutshell, Snapfish is the name of a online photo service that turns uploaded digital photos into physical printed objects such as photobooks. This year’s Monopoly Coast to Coast Snapfish instant win prize, which must be redeemed online, is for some manner of personalized Snapfish calendar — probably the least expensive USD$19 version.

Snapfish, by the way, is now owned by District Photo (a “leader in digital imaging fulfillment services”), which paid an undisclosed amount of money to take it off Hewlett-Packard’s hands in April of this year. HP had originally snapped up the company back in 2005 for USD$300 million, when it still seemed as though there was a mass market for printed photographs. HP began trying to unload Snapfish in 2013, two years after Instagram proved, beyond any Flickr of a doubt, that most people were more than happy to share their photos online.

As usual, I will post all my McDonald’s Canada Monopoly Snapfish stickers as I receive them and anyone who wants to, is free to redeem the codes online and take the prizes (see photo above).

Aside from the food and cash prizes, the only 2015 McDonald’s Canada Monopoly prize that interests me is the iON Air Pro HD Wi-Fi Camera but I would still much prefer the Polaroid Cube from the 2014 Monopoly contest. That however, only appeared on the promotional posters, not — so far as I know — as an actual sticker prize. Click the images to enlarge them.

For information on McDonald’s Canada’s 2018 Coast to Coast Monopoly contest—especially the new Canvas Pop prize—see here.