I live in Florida, and last night’s lottery was $30 million (over a bunch of years, pre-tax, etc). Also saw the movie “Jumper” yesterday, and at one point the protagonist has a bunch of cash in his apartment. While I was at the gas station there was a line for this and it got me wondering:
What is the margin that businesses receive when they sell a one dollar lottery ticket in the U.S.? I know this might vary, but looking for an approximation. Would like to know for Florida or any similar U.S. Lottery.
If someone won the $30 million jackpot, that gives them approximately $10 million NPV after taxes (for sake of this question let’s assume exactly that amount). If the winner wanted to get the whole $10,000,000 USD lump sum in crisp, new one dollar bills, how much space would this take up in his apartment?
In Texas, the retailer gets a 5% commission on each ticket sold, and 1% of any jackpot prizes from tickets sold at that store (with caps on the various games).
From this site, “A million dollars in 100 dollar bills has a volume of 643 cubic inches. A million dollars in one dollar bills would be 64,300 cubic inches or 37 cubic feet.” That’s a cube around 1 meter on a side.
$10,000,000 at 1 gram per bill would weigh 22,046 pounds and 3.6 ounces, give or take – about 11 tons.
If you just stacked them up (somehow), you’d have a pile of dollar bills 6.14" long x 2.61" wide x 3583 ft. 4" tall. Stack up the two world trade center towers and throw on the Park Tower in Chicago, and you’re there, give or take a few inches.
Ummm. $10,000,000 at one gram per bill would weigh 10,000,000 grams which is exactly 10 tons, not 11. I have handled 1000 Uzbek Sum bills vacuum packed (equiv. of 100 USD) - the package approximately had the size of a 0.5 l carton of milk, IIRC. The 10 million would occupy a space equivalent to 10,000 of those packages. Quite a lot.
Sorry. Never realized there were two different terms. In Danish we use “ton”, signifying 1,000 kg. Still it seems unnecessary for atomicbadgerrace to convert 10,000,000 grams to pounds & ounces before going to tons.
In America, we don’t readily think in tons, largely because they are not a very useful measure when you consider that long tons equal 2,240 lbs., and even short tons equal 2,200 lbs.
So we naturally think in terms of pounds and ounces, though the conversion to tons helps put it in some perspective.
There are three different tons:
(1) A short ton, used in the US, equal to 2,000 lb or about 907 kg.
(2) A long ton, or imperial ton, used in other English-speaking countries before conversion to metric, equal to 2,240 lb or about 1,016 kg.
(3) A metric ton, or “tonne”, used in most of the world, equal to 1,000 kg or about 2,205 lb.
As for the size of the 10,000,000 bills. FWIW here is a picture of me holding 1000 vacuum packed bills in each hand. 10,000 of those would take up a lot of space.
I hereby propose that in the future all threads involving lotteries the OP must include the line “I know that lotteries are a tax on people too stupid to do math” or some variation thereof. This will save people from feeling obligated to threadshit or otherwise hijack the thread.
