Most of you will be familiar with the Monopoly-themed sweepstakes promotion periodically held by McDonald’s. Certain products or meals come with a lottery ticket, which may be either an instant win (such as a free dessert), or one of the streets on the Monopoly board (or a blank). In case it’s a street, you need to collect all streets that form a set on the game board, and then you can win a prize. Other companies have, of course, similar promotions with different themes.
In principle, I can see two ways McDonald’s could calculate the number of prizes they can expect to pay out under this scheme. Either all the streets in each set are printed and distributed roughly evenly, and they use stochastics (based on assumptions about the number of tickets each customer gets) to calculate the probability that a customer will end up with a full set. Or they print two of the three streets in a set in very large numbers, and the third one in very small numbers, and the absolute numbers in which this third street exists is the ceiling for the overall number of prizes to be won.
I’ve always assumed they use the second method - it gives them more control over the number of prizes they need to pay out, and it can’t be subverted by players exchanging tickets among each other. But I’ve always felt that it’s a bit deceitful - it gives lots of people the impression that they’re close to winning because they’re just one street short of a full set, yet the likelihood of getting the missing street is tiny. This may, of course, be a feature of the scheme, not a bug, to keep people hooked. Am I right, and this is how it works?
Yes it’s the latter. There are web pages that will tell you which are the rare streets to find.
And in fact the last iteration of the McD app here in the UK implicitly concedes this. Because, if you had a duplicate street you could exchange it for another commonly-found street. (The exact wording might not have been “commonly-found”, but it was something like that)
This first came out when I was about 8 years old. It was pretty apparent to everyone I knew how this worked. No one was under the impression that every Park Place had a matching Boardwalk out there, and McDonalds was about to be on the hook for paying out a million dollars to every household in America.
Deceptive or not, it’s pretty smart marketing, as there are several levels of thinking you’ve won something and getting invested:
Say you and your family go for McDs and you’ve never seen the Monopoly thing before. You peel the thing off your burger box and it says “Liverpool St – flatscreen TV” say.
Did I just win a TV? You’re inclined to think probably not, except one of your kids’ stickers says Apple Pie, and he was indeed able to collect an apple pie.
Then you read the details and find you need to collect all the properties for your prize. …which seems doable because between you you’ve already completed the brown color set, which gives you a free medium meal.
Even when the penny drops that there are rare properties for the real prizes, without googling it, how do you know that “Liverpool St” isn’t a rare property? Better hang on to it…
As an aside, I also wondered whether there was ever a serious problem with counterfeit streets in this promotion. It can’t be an issue now, because today the tickets don’t say the name of the street on their face; all you get is a code which you need to enter into an app to see what your ticket turned out as. But perhaps people would fake rare streets in the past.
The UK stickers still have the name of the street and prize on the front…I’m surprised to hear they don’t do that in the US, because ISTM intrinsic to the effectiveness of the campaign.
But there is a code too, so it’s fraud-proof unless someone hacks the code database or reverse engineers the algorithm. Even then, if you were to try to claim a car, say, you would have the issue that they will likely know a crime has been committed when two people try to claim the same thing.
I watched a documentary about it btw, and it was infuriating, because there were years of Jacobson’s friends winning the big prizes, and Jacobsen himself living the high life, and the investigators were slowly, slowly closing the net around him, and wanted to catch him in the act. The implication was that if he had stopped at, say, $20 million, he would have got away scott free.
ETA: Not to be too critical of the investigators, it’s just astonishing that someone can so flagrantly commit fraud, for so long.
Creating the impression that you “almost” won is a very common feature among sweepstakes and lotteries. The only obligation that the promoters are under is that the published odds are genuine. You see this a lot in various “scratch off” lotteries. Losing tickets will have many more “close” combinations than you would expect than if each ticket were generated randomly – e.g. if it’s a poker themed contest, you’ll see a lot of “just one off from a straight flush” combinations.
But you were never “close” – that card was planned to be a loser. As long as the published run included enough winners to make the game as a whole compliant with the odds, it doesn’t matter what’s printed on each individual card.
At some point in the 80s or 90s, the Mars Candy Company had a similar promotion around Halloween, where every candy bar wrapper had a letter inside of it, and you had to spell out some nonsense word to win a prize (with, again, one of the letters being extremely rare). I think they also had one other letter that was kind of rare-ish, to give you a sense of accomplishment when you found that one, though that could have just been a manifestation of the Coupon-Collector Problem. I actually did manage to complete the word, but I metered out my Halloween candy over such a long time that by the time I did, all of the packages with the directions were gone from the shelves, and so I had no idea what I had to do to redeem my prize, or even what the prize would have been.
Perhaps not, but I recall reading classified ads in the newspaper of people wanting to swap game pieces (or combine game pieces with the object of splitting a high-ticket prize).
Looking at all the “winning” pieces that were accidently thrown away, are there stats showing the possible prize money given away versus the real amount given away per year?
Nice scam. But it got started when an outside vendor accidentally mailed some tamper-proof seals to Jacobson. This allowed him to open packs of winning stickers and swap in duds. But that was just one time, right? How did he continue to run the scam in later versions of the game?
I have a vague memory that when I was a child, there was a scratch-off game where every card was a winner, but you had to scratch off a certain set of items in a large list. Something like, you had to pick the correct 4 out of 25 items. Scratching one incorrect item would make the card a loser. But thinking about it, it seems unlikely that a company would risk releasing a game like this with such potential for a big loss if someone figures out how to view the unscratched items, or restore scratched items, etc. Was there ever a game or lottery like this?
Even if “every card was a winner,” the vast majority of the prizes would have been on the small side. Like the McDonald’s Monopoly game, where there are tons of “winning” game pieces with free food, but only a handful (out of many millions) that have bigger prizes, they undoubtedly printed very few cards on which one could win a large prize.
I remember that too. The ad would say that if you had one of the following list, they would split the prize with you. Anyone even remotely savvy would know that that was the list of rarities and if you got one of those, you were close to the prize.
We ran one at Wendy’s while I worked there 20 years ago that was an “every card is a winner” type of game - 3 places, scratch off one of the 3, if it says a prize you win. But 99.99% of prizes were just a free fry, frosty, or drink.
