Who buys them? People on the scratcher, thats who.
Some years ago I watched a documentary on gambling. One segment featured research on the phenomenon of intermittent positive reinforcement. It showed a monkey in a lab experiment: pressing a lever would sometimes cause a tasty food pellet to be delivered to the monkey. But only (a guess here) about 5 percent of the time - on average, once every 20 presses, but not exactly. The monkey spent pretty much all of his time hammering away at that lever, as fast as he could move his little monkey arms. He was indeed addicted to gambling. This was in stark contrast to another monkey who reliably received a food pellet with every press, or even every few presses; that monkey knew he could count on the results, and so he didn’t feel the same sense of urgency/desperation/addiction that the gambling monkey did.
The intermittency of reinforcement (and of course the instant gratification of a win) are key drivers of addiction. A short-sighted addict who spends $7000 per year on scratch-offs will not be happy investing those lost sums in an index fund, even though he would clearly be much better off financially.
Similar research here, which showed that monkeys actually preferred gambling over an activity with a sure payoff, even when the average payout from gambling was significantly less than the sure payoff:
A relative of mine won $50 000 on a scratchie back in the 80s. So, yes, they do pay off on occasion. I haven’t personally bought one in years but my mum tends to give them as presents at Xmas and birthdays. I won $40 on the ones my mum gave me this Xmas, so that was a pretty good result for me 
We do this also. And I agree that the appeal is immediate gratification. We don’t buy them except at Christmas, and when we do buy lottery tickets it is when the jackpot gets huge.
The first lottery ticket I ever bought was in a pool that included one of the world’s leading experts on combinatorics, so you don’t have to be innumerate or dumb to buy a lottery ticket.
BTW, we came out ahead.
By ‘quite favorable’, do you actually mean positive-expected value? I know little about scratch-off games, and I could certainly imagine scenarios where if you have perfect information (how many tickets remain, how many prizes remain), you could potentially be +EV. But that doesn’t occur in the real world - in the real world, you can only know the prizes that have been claimed, not the prizes that have been won, and there’s going to be some lag in the information about how many tickets remain. Do the ideal world requirements closely enough approximate real world conditions that this can be favorable?
Stupid people, I think.
I think of lotteries as a “stupid tax”. If you are dumb, it’s gonna cost ya.
I’m not accounting for the entertainment value, of course.
I really wish people would quit saying this, because it is totally bogus.
Lotteries are entertainment. You pay a buck and get a moment’s anticipation as you do the scratch-off. It’s the same for everyone, rich or poor. And if a poor person is buying lottery tickets and seriously expecting to win, the problem is not that they are poor, the problem is that they are stupid.
I think these two consecutive posts are hilarious. Really?
And we can’t even remember to do them as stocking stuffers. But every once in a blue moon (like once every couple of years), it’s fun to buy one and for a moment, think you may win a $1000 A WEEK FOR LIFE!!
We’ll pick some up for fun whenever we’re in the U.S. During our visit to New York City in 2012, there was a newsstand next to our hotel on the Upper West Side. We bought a couple of $1 scratch-offs for fun but didn’t win anything. The clerk urged the wife to go ahead and buy one more, he guaranteed it would be a winner. So we bought it, she scratched it off, and it was a $5 winner! Now, how did the clerk know that? We never figured out if that was a coincidence or he was able to rig it somehow.
Texas didn’t have scratch-off lottery cards when I lived there. But during a visit back in the 1990s, they had them then. And I read in the newspaper that this one Einstein working in a convenience store in a small town in the Panhandle figured at least one of the tickets he was selling just had to be a big winner. So he started scratching all of them off, intending to pay for them with the loot from that big winner, which just had to be in there somewhere. He went through all of them but didn’t win much. So he called the police and reported he’d been robbed, the bandits making off with all the lottery tickets. Then the police looked in the garbage out back and found all the scratched-off tickets.
For a lot of people, a lot, the “entertainment” value is not there at all. It’s an addiction. Unless you are willing to say that drunks get drunk and heroin addicts shoot up for “entertainment”, then you should refine your statement by quite a bit. In particular: “totally bogus” is far from true.
The only people I know (for sure) regularly do scratch off things like to brag about it when they win $50 and such. But you know they are net losing money (that they can’t afford to lose) and are ignoring their losses. I don’t see any entertainment value here. It’s a sad situation.
The State of Oregon makes most of it’s money on video poker machines. Most of the people on those machines just park at them as long as they have money. You don’t spend all day losing all your dough for entertainment. This is what gambling looks like. The once a week $1-2 people are noise in the data.
I’d wager you don’t think much of gambling, nor think it is a form of entertainment? Most gamblers I know don’t stay “parked” at a machine until they run out of money. And most don’t spend all day losing all of their dough while gambling either. Yes, there are “problem” and “addicted” gamblers, but they don’t represent “most” gamblers, and certainly not “most” scratch-off buyers.
Aside from your daughter comment, you’re related to me.
And I hate getting lottery tickets in my stocking 