Found Money

I have always had difficulty understanding gambling addiction. Two stories I heard about it completely blew my mind:

• Years ago a good friend had a colleague who had saved $10K over several years for a vacation in Vegas. When the time came she gambled it all away in three days and had to come home early. She claimed not to have been bothered by this.
• Years later there was a news story about a clerical worker who embezzled over two million dollars from the medical clinic she worked in to spend on instant game tickets. This was at a time when instant tickets didn't offer large jackpots.

Now we have a $30 ticket that commemorates the 50^th anniversary of our state lottery. It's gold, shiny, and very prominently displayed in dealers' stores. I've recently observed that there are addicts in my neighborhood.

My state lottery has an afterlife for their losing tickets wherein you can enter their identification numbers for chances in a weekly drawing for $500. All entries not selected roll over to the monthly drawing for $2,500 and those not selected there expire. Sometimes certain tickets earn entries in special drawings, such as one for a cruise which was done a couple of months ago. Since I routinely buy a few draw tickets per week I decided to enter them and due to the maximum allowable number of daily entries this became an addiction of its own.

I started raiding the wastepaper baskets in retailers' stores. These are typically located within two steps of the ticket scanner. I quickly learned that the random number of chances earned by entering a ticket increases with the ticket's purchase price so I began looking for the higher-priced scratch tickets, mostly leaving behind the ones that cost less than five dollars. If I get the lower-priced ones it's because I've arrived at the right hour for that store and there is a large pile of them in the basket. Within the space of two weeks I found three tickets that won money but had not been cashed for a total of $16. The purchasers either did not scratch the relevant fields adequately or were not wearing their glasses and could not decipher the winning numbers. Three days ago a string of $2 tickets included one that had not been scratched at all which turned out to be a $5 winner. A shocked friend commented that the purchaser may as well have tossed out a $5 bill. He was even more shocked at hearing that I had actually found a $1 bill in one of those bins.

What defies my understanding is how much money some people spend on these tickets. A few years ago when I was adequately employed I purchased one of the early $20 scratch tickets. It was a beginner's luck purchase, as it won me $30. I collected the money and stopped there for the day.

The only occasions for which I had ever spend more than $20 at a time were when purchasing enough $1 or $2 leprechaun-themed scratch tickets for my friends' St Patrick's Day parties. A consecutive string of 50 of these should produce at least a few small wins. Obviously I am not the only person to observe this, as I have found consecutive tickets that – telling by the manner in which they were scratched – were obviously bought by the same person. But 10 $30 tickets? 12 $25 tickets? Nor is that restricted to instant-win tickets; I've seen and picked up stacks of Quick Draw and Win 4 draw tickets that sold for $20 each. Theses were often folded as a stack and discarded together, so it was obvious that they were discarded by the same person. The $300 someone spent on the 10 $30 instant tickets would buy 8 entrées at Red Lobster or three weeks of groceries. Maybe a new business suit or evening dress. For me that could be two seats at the opera. I wondered what that person didn't buy because of that. I wondered the same thing about the person who bought the 8 $25 tickets I found that week.

When I got home from finding those $25 tickets I checked the website for the previous week's winners list. My name was on it. The check arrived five days later, just before the holiday. Holiday weekends don't yield much when harvesting the losing tickets from these places.

Two weeks later, instead of buying the new cell phone I had been thinking about I had to get a new laptop. There goes the $500, so off I go to the lottery dealers to harvest more losing tickets.

The dealers in my neighborhood know what I'm doing; thus far they do not mind. Two of them know I've already won $500. I've identified the best times of the day for each one, but I don't plan my days around this. The higher-priced scratch tickets are usually scarce from Sunday-Tuesday; Friday is the best day to find those. The new $5 tickets are popular, and now I have several hundred of them.

It's been a month now since my $500 win and now there are other drawings to hope for wins. There will be a monthly drawing to commemorate the 50^th anniversary of the lottery and no extra effort is required. I entered a ticket last night and got a “this is not a qualified entry” message, which meant it was a winning ticket. I got $40 richer today for that. Little surprises like that are always welcome.