Look, lady, I just wanna buy a can of soda! You think I feel like standing in line five minutes while you fill out that stupid sheet just so you can stupidly waste ten bucks?!
Even more annoying are the clerks who need to be guided to the precise ticket.
“The green one. No, no. Up. Nope, nope. On the left. No, your LEFT. Yeah, gimme ten o’ those. Wait, no. Gimme the Cash 5. No, on the bottom…”
It can go on for a while. But hey, them kids gots to go to college somehow!
But wait, she’s not finished yet! She still needs to throw her losing scratch tickets on the ground outside the convenience store!
A lot of local convenience stores have done away with the lottery machines near where I work. The were too inconvenient for their more profitable customers.
I feel a little sorry for these people getting their gambling fix at a Kwik-E Mart.
Jim
Yeah this is great! As if the lottery isn’t mathematically against you enough as it, it’s as though you’ve somehow got better chances when you’re scratching off the little dog bones versus scratching off the American flags.
These are the same people who spends (what feels like) hours considering and laboring over the placement of the cut-card playing blackjack in the casino!
Hey man, everybody knows if you place it in just the right spot, your odds of winning go way up! Sheesh.
And everybody knows that if you make the wrong decision while playing 3rd base you’ll screw the whole table over! :rolleyes:
The dog bones might have overall odds of 1:3.41 and the flags odds of 1:4.04, or differences in available prizes left or something so, yeah, it could matter, if you were obsessed enough.
I once bought 70 scratch offs at the gas station (5 of this kind, 5 of that) and got a moral lecture from a customer in line. The fact that I was buying them as prizes for a weekly bingo game run by my Alpha Phi Omega chapter at a nursing home, and only buying them because the residents chewed out everyone they could find when they weren’t on the prize table the week before, didn’t seem to matter to her.
I’ve mentioned that when I was in high school, I worked at a local grocery store. Well, one part of my job was working the service counter/office, and I used to sell lotto tickets. DAMN, some of those people were nuts. They’d spend 50 bucks on tickets, win 25, and think they were ahead. Or they’d have huge checks cashed just to spend on tickets.
The sad thing was, a lot of them were elderly, probably on fixed incomes.
They don’t seem to realize that their chances of winning are only marginally improved by actually purchasing a ticket.
That is, as a matter of fact, quite true.
Now if only there were some way for the player to know where the right spot is . . .
Their inevitable response? “Well, someone’s gotta win.”
:rolleyes:
Yeah, but it’s also true with scratch tickets, someone has probably already won the big prizes.
But they keep selling the tickets until they’re all gone. :dubious:
Sometimes it seems like lotteries are just a way to tax dreams!
Or rather, they’re Stupidity Taxes.
I saw some stand-up comic on TV when the California lottery was introduced in the '80s say, “Let’s play the home version of the California State Lottery!” Then he pulled a dollar out of his wallet, crumpled it up, and threw it over his shoulder.
I got a lottery ticket as a party favor a few months ago and actually won $7. Cashed it in at Sears. It took them about 15 minutes to get me my seven bucks. Thank Og there wasn’t a line behind me.
And their odds of losing increased even further!
There was also the comedian (don’t remember who) who said:
“Instead of playing the slot machines at the casino, I like to just spend my whole trip up in my hotel room. I hang out in the bathroom and flush my quarters down the toilet one by one. It’s basically the same as playing the slots, except that every now and then the toilet backs up, overflows, and I hit the jackpot!”
Naw, gambling is just a tax on people who can’t count.
For what it’s worth, my parents used to play the California lottery in the 80s and actually won fairly regularly. Never more than about three hundred dollars, mark you, but the number of times we got at least three numbers right (which was five bucks, and as recently as 1986 five bucks was nothing to sneeze at considering it could probably halfway fill the gas tank) was non-trivial.
That said, gah. Back in the day they had a little kiosk. You could fill out the card for however long it took and then carry it up to the register. “One of these and a quick-pick.” They were scan-trons, IIRC, and you got a little print-out when you were done. Didn’t take that long.
Yeah, but there’s a difference between playing just for shits and giggles (like my dad used to do, and my grandmother still does), and actually seriously thinking you’re just a ticket away from a jackpot.
Although, when I was little, I thought my dad really WAS going to win someday, and I’d get a horse. Probably because he’d always say, “When I win the lottery” when I’d ask if I could have a horse.