I hate it when the company I work at buys mass lottery tickets. I don’t particularly want to spend money on lottery tickets, but it would be very hard to take being the one person left in the office after everyone else wins a million bucks. In the interest of partial disclosure, my husband does by tickets when the pay-off is over a certain figure. Like Justin, we spend a handful of dollars on this per year. We spend far more on junk food, I’m sure.
I’m finding it interesting how we have a current thread about spending $65,000 on a wedding, and the majority opinion there is that it is their money, they can spend it how they like, but this thread is almost blanket condemnation of people … spending their money how they like. Sure, poor people shouldn’t waste their money on lottery tickets, but you can’t legislate good sense.
(That said, my brother-in-law with the horseshoe up his ass and my sister won a $500,000 house last year on a hospital lottery. I’m not even slightly bitter or jealous. Not even a twinge. Nuh-uh, not me.)
Oh yeah, the OP - buy your shit and get the hell out of the store so I can buy my shit. It must drive the cashiers crazy, too; some person buying lottery stuff for five minutes, while the line of people with slurpees gets longer and longer…
Yup. In fact, you probably have a better chance making money by following a good (read: one who really gets to know their mark) psychic’s advice than by playing the lottery.
But you see, those things actually accomplish their intended purpose, as frivolous as that purpose might be. Psychics don’t commune with the spirit world and the lottery isn’t going to win you money. Neither accomplish what they are intended to do and that is why the analogy is apt. If you can truly say that you really do not actually believe there is a chance you will win and you just like to scratch off metal foil, then more power to you, but I doubt it.
Hardly. There are plenty of strange and wonderful things in this world with which to take a flight of fancy… you know, with things that actually work, without the lottery. Oh, and the tax isn’t on stupidity, it’s a tax on those who are bad at math. There are some otherwise smart people who just can’t gauge probabilities.
Not at all. Just humored by the attempt. The outcome is really irrelevant in the short term. It is like watching someone superstitious who “knocks on wood” all the time. It is funny, and a little sad, to watch the compulsion whether or not something good or bad happens immediately afterward.
But I have won. Or are you now calling me a liar in addition to stupid?
And the intended purpose of a lottery ticket is a chance to think about winning enough money to buy something fun for a few minutes. How do I not accomplish that everytime I play?
When I actually win (and as I’ve established, I do win on occasion), that’s a bonus. And a free dinner for my wife and I. And free food is the best kind of food.
I used to be one of those “The lottery is a stupidity tax” people too. Now I’m less judgemental. Many people who play the lottery do it for enjoyment, watch the drawings each night and root for their numbers the way any sports fan roots for their team.
So think of it in compairison to being a sports fan. A season ticket holder shells out hundreds (if not thousands) a year for seats, as well as concession fees, tee shirts and hats, etc etc blah blah blah. The return they get is a few hours of distraction and an occasional chance to cheer. A lottery player gets the same thing, but without the watery stadium beer or obnoxious logo crap merchandise. Plus they get a tiny chance of actually winning money, which the sports fan emphatically never gets (unless they gamble, of course.)
So as a hobby, the lottery is really a harmless venture and there’s nothing wrong with it. As an income generator for the state, it’s certainly more fun than paying taxes.
Now I know there’s a problem with promoting gambling, and people who blow way too much money on tickets. I also know there are people going broke buying too much sports team merchandise, not to mention the people going broke blowing all their money on alcohol and smack. Hell, there are even people blowing all their money on subprime mortgages! If your problem is with people who can’t handle their money, then why are you focusing on the lottery as a perpetrator? I’m with Justin_Bailey (only not as vehement.) Jump off that moral high horse and leave the lottery alone.
I can never remember to play the lottery, except when I’m waitressing. I have a separate compartment for tips (if there are any) from asshole customers. Then at the end of my shift, I’ll take that undoubtedly tiny amount and buy a pick or two. That way, if I ever do win, I can thank the dick who made it all possible. The only time that person will have made the world a better place.
As a former gas station clerk, I can tell you it’s not the people that come in to buy a Quick Pick or two, or the ones that say, Gimme 2 $2 Monopolies (there are like 5 different Monopoly scratch-offs- when they don’t specify then I want to punch them).
It’s the ones that come in with a stack of tickets to check (instead of looking in the newspaper or catching the drawing on the news- or indeed, asking for the printout of winning numbers) and THEN buying 5 more tickets, none of which are Quick Picks or filled out on a slip so they have to be entered manually, and then buying half a dozen different types of scratch-offs.
An asshole buying lottery can hold up the line for 10 full minutes or more*, and where I worked, I was the only employee there, so there was no option of another cashier ringing up purchases for the folks waiting patiently behind the asshat. It’s bad enough to be stuck behind a jackass like that, it’s even worse to have to wait on them, and in the 15 minutes it takes to get their lotttery purchases taken care of you have a line forming behind them.
Then there’s the idiots that will buy a whole roll of scratch-off tickets ($300) over the course of half an hour, trying to win that top prize. Oh, they’ll win $20 or $50 or even $100 sometimes (if you’re playing the $20 tickets) but they always come out behind. Usually because they just put that money towards more tickets.
Not that I never buy lottery tickets. On my birthday while working at the gas station, I was going to suggest one of the $20 tickets to a customer unsure of what to buy (she was a regular) but something told me not to. She bought other tickets, and when she left I bought the $20 ticket, and won $40 bucks. I would never normally spend $20 on a scratch-off, but it was my birthday and I had a good feeling.
*[sub] if they don’t fill out a slip or ask for a Quick Pick. Some people know that lottery takes forever and will let others go first, which is awesome, but most are oblivious to anyone’s needs but their own[/sub]
I actually did my senior thesis on this phenomenon back in the early-1990’s and in my examples (IIRC, Florida and NY, but it’s been a while) and, at the time, this was absolutely true.
However, I have no idea as to whether this continues.
We might spend $15 per year on lottery tickets. It’s an entertaining little moment in dreamworld, as others have said. People who “invest” in Lotto are another story and need gambling addiction help, but for the rest of us, it’s fun.
The last lottery ticket I bought was at a machine at the bowling alley last week. In California, they’re now promoting new scratcher tickets featuring local baseball teams. I got very excited about the fact that there was a Dodger scratcher on display in the machine. Even though it was two dollars instead of one, I’m a die-hard fan, and I figured it was worth the extra buck. Besides, I was guaranteed to win since it was a Dodger scratcher, right???
Fucking machine spit out an Angels scratcher.
And my bitter complaints to management got me nowhere since the bowling alley doesn’t technically regulate the machine. So I scratched it. And lost. But only because the Angels are losers. It had nothing to do with the odds.
Part of my “if I win the lottery” daydream is writing a four or five figure check to the clerk who sold me my two quickpicks. Though it might be more fitting if it went to the guy who programmed the random number generator down at lottery headquarters.
I’m glad that JohnT spoke up about the mess that the lottery money has led to in NY. Now I can sit back and let him weather the calls for cites, while I simply nod and say what a sage chap he is.
AIUI the original arguments in favor of the NYS Lottery were to take the numbers racket out of the hands of the mafia. Because it was a tax on people who couldn’t see the odds were poor, and funded things that the majority of the population didn’t care about.
Thirty years later, the only thing that’s changed, as far as I can see, is that the ones benefiting don’t call themselves the mafia. They’re the government.
I agree with fruitbat - the state takes a such a fraction of the take that it would be considered criminal if it were being done by a casino. Or when it was done by the mafia. Hell, if the mafia had used the same percentages, I doubt that they’d have been able to get enough tickets sold to make things worthwhile.
I’ll admit I buy a ticket when the jackpots get really, really high. But I don’t believe that people who buy following that pattern actually are who keep the state run lotteries in business. Look at the number that the Boston Globe article mentioned upthread had: a per capita outlay of over a thousand dollars a year. That’s not chump change, even if it is done at only $20 a week.
At this point I am inclined to believe that state-run gambling, like sin taxes, are seen only as ways to increase taxation without having the majority of the electorate realize what’s going on.
In the interest of partial disclosure, my husband does by tickets when the pay-off is over a certain figure. Like Justin, we spend a handful of dollars on this per year. We spend far more on junk food, I’m sure.