So,
we was eating out at Applebee’s
My friend notices on the bill that along with all the small print legal mumbo jumbo for a sweepstakes offered on the bill receipt is “Canadian winners subject to skills testing”
Picture should be attached, if not I will attach in comments
Anyway, so we got to wondering. What the hell are they talking about? Why would Canadian customers be subject to skills testing?
Best I can come up with is, from what I understand, financial regulations in Canada are VERY conservative, in the financial sense. Canadian banks largely escaped the housing crash because they had never even been ALLOWED to make crappy loans, because the mortgage-loan process is so detailed/regulated.
So I’m guessing that what it is is the Canadian government won’t let citizens even win money without first checking that they won’t start over-spending like an idiot and end up destitute like other lottery winners have.
No. We’re a nanny state, but not that much of a nanny state. The purpose of the skill testing question is to transform the contest from an illegal game of chance to a legal game of skill.
What kind of skills testing is actually done? Is it more or less trivial, or do some companies set up tough challenges? What, I have to memorize two whole pages of the phone book? With only 20 minutes of study?
Ohhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhh…
that’s SO stupid. That really made me LOL. That really sounds so stupid.
They couldn’t just write the anti-gambling laws to have exceptions for “lotteries” entered into from purchases? That super simple and common and harmless advertising mechanism?
Australian states have the same laws, and the “skills test” usually involves something as complicated as changing the wording from “the first entry drawn” to “the first, neatest entry drawn” or “The first, correct entry drawn”. A judge then decides that you have written your name an phone number neatly. Or you have to solve some devilishly clever puzzle like “Fill in the blanks to name a popular family Restaurant: A_ple_ees”.
It seems bizarre that something as simple as being arbitrarily judged as having neat handwriting when drawn at random from a barrel circumvents the lottery laws, but there you have it.
You would think that would be it, but I’ve never seen one so simple. It’s usually more like: (3X6)-(2X5)+2. They never try to catch you with an order of operations clause. If you don’t understand parentheses though you’re screwed.
Just to nitpick - not all contests require a skill testing question. The big ones like Lotto 6-49 certainly don’t. Even small ones don’t necessarily require one, BUT such contests have very specific rules, most notably that they must be charity-related. I’m a volunteer at a local hospital and I sell “Nevada” tickets (aka pull-tab tickets) twice a week. You win, I give you your prize money (or more tickets if you prefer) no questions asked. The profits do go to charity (in particular, to the hospital I am selling them in).
According to the blog link above, the question has to be “multi-step and multi-operational”.
My guess is, Canandian lawmakers realized that skills questions like “What is 1+1?” were comically stupid, but rather than do the sensible thing and say “Screw it,” they made system a bit more onerous.
Same here in the UK. We, like most European countries have a state lottery (ours is privatised but it is still a state thing). To run a lottery needs a licence which is hard to get, so many competitions - we see them on TV programmes all the time - have trivial questions as above.
Much the same here - the promotion or game e.g. ‘spot-the-ball’, must involve an element of something other than pure chance to sidestep the laws on gambling (which originally forbade gambling away from the race track or the casino).
While this Canadian has matured past making silly rape jokes, I still get a chuckle from my old thread about how Subway Scrabble underhandedly revoked my $15 gift card.
There are of course laws against gambling in the United States, but the usual loophole that allows sweepstakes is that it’s OK to give away prizes as long as you don’t charge customers to play. Hence the inevitable American wording of “No purchase necessary”–you can come in and ask for the sweepstakes ticket that they normally give away with a purchase, but they know that most people are too embarrassed to do it.
I’m surprised to hear that this doesn’t work in Canada. It seems less cheesy than a “skills test”.
