I was in 7-11 today and someone bought a Mega Millions ticket and she told the girl, you put the wrong number in, void this and give me these numbers. She didn’t use the card, but wrote numbers on a piece of paper.
The clerk told her Mega Millions were unable to be voided and she’d have to pay for it. The manager came over and eventually the lady gave the money and walked out in a huff.
Is this actually so? I would assume there must be some method of voiding a lotto ticket. What if a clerk who knew s/he was going to be let go printed up a few hundred of them and left. Would the store be stuck with them?
Anyone who works with lottery machines know if Mega Millions or Powerball tickets can be voided once printed? Other types too?
No, a Powerball ticket CANNOT be cancelled by the retailer after it is generated, so be sure to check your numbers and verify your ticket cost prior to purchase. http://www.nc-educationlottery.org/faq_powerball.aspx
Yes, the store is stuck with them. But they could withhold them from the clerks last paycheck, or sue to recover the costs. And the store would collect if one of them won, and the clerk hadn’t paid for it.
I don’t know if it’s in effect for the national ones, but the store manager used to be able to contact the lottery office and ask them to cancel (void) a series of lottery tickets. But they had to do this X hours in advance of the lottery drawing. And had to have a good reason. Generally used when someone stole a whole bunch of lottery tickets, or spilled soda over a whole roll of tickets.
It’s extremely rare that you can withhold things from an employee’s check, and in those cases, it would have to be in a contract they signed in the first place.
I don’t think that they would be allowed to withhold the money, but suing them, sure.
This is the same question, though, what if a clerk knows it’s their last day, so they flood the parking lot with the gas pumps, or break all the beer bottles, or any other acts of vandalism that someone may be inclined to do. Sure, the store would have to eat the cost, but it’s not something that many people would think of doing, because you would likely be in quite a bit of trouble afterwards.
But, yeah, every store I have been in that I noticed they sold lottery tickets, (I have only bought a lottery ticket maybe 6 times in my life) it always said that all lottery ticket sales were final.
But a sale isn’t completed until I accept the merchandise and hand over the money. If a clerk prints the wrong numbers on the ticket and I refuse to accept it, it’s hard to imagine they can force me to pay. Or do you acknowledge it somehow before it’s printed? I’ve never bought one.
If you Google, you can find lots of examples like that. The second link below with an example of a clerk claiming she did have to buy them as brought up in a previous post. The third is a story of an unwanted one in Canada that was cancelled by customer request.
I doubt this really happens all that often. If it were a major problem, there are plenty of easy ways to solve it, perhaps by requiring customers to write their selections down and banning any customers who fail to buy a ticket that matches what they wrote down.
In fact, aren’t lottery tickets usually issued by filling out a little machine-readable thing with bubbles? So they already have this method implemented.
There are lots of cases where a clerk making a mistake or a customer being a moron can cost stores $1 worth of merchandise. Cost of doing business.