Lottery agent good as gold
Xavier Gabriel owns the most popular lottery office in Spain, the country with the world’s biggest lottery players.
Xavier Gabriel did not take part last month’s El Gordo, or the Fat One, Spain’s immense Christmas lottery drawing. But that is because he felt he had already won it, as the owner of the most popular lottery office in the country of the biggest lottery players in the world.
“I used to play the lottery when I didn’t have any money,” Gabriel said.
“But now that I’ve got the money, I want to allow others to get rich instead.”
His own fortunes picked up, he said, when his lottery business gained nationwide fame after he did an interview on Spanish radio and noted that the name of his village, Sort, meant “luck” in Catalan, the language that is spoken in this northeastern region of Spain.
Then, in 1994, somebody for the first time actually won a lottery prize with a ticket issued in Sort. Gabriel, 58, used the occasion to rename his office “The Golden Witch,” which has since become a national emblem of luck and a formidable merchandising brand that he uses to sell trinkets, children’s books and even a line of shoes.
“The best marketing is the most simple one, and that begins with just finding the right name for your business,” he said. “I made the witch famous across Spain overnight.”
This year the Golden Witch office sold about 50million worth of tickets for two lottery draws — one just before Christmas and a smaller one on Jan. 6, the Feast of the Epiphany — that most Spaniards consider an integral part of their end-of-year festivities.
Spain’s national lottery company said 3.2-billion worth of tickets were sold for the first draw, of which 2.2 billion euros will be paid in prize money. While a full ticket costs 200, it is subdivided so that people generally go for the more affordable option of buying a 10th of a ticket.
Gabriel said 87 per cent of his tickets were sold online, but about 300,000 people made the pilgrimage up the windy road to Sort to buy them in person, many coming in organized weekend bus trips.
Since he started his business, Gabriel said, the Golden Witch has issued the top individual prize for one of the two Christmas season draws on 36 occasions.
“I come every year to buy this lottery for my family and closest friends,” said Arsemari Maguregui, a housewife who drove over five hours with her husband from Abadiño, in Basque Country, to spend 160 at the Golden Witch.
“We’ve never won, but I keep hope that it will happen one day.”
A serial entrepreneur who started work at 16 as a banking clerk, Gabriel eventually acquired the licence to run an office of the state-owned lottery in his village in 1986.
Spaniards are not particularly obsessed with gambling and casinos, but they are the heaviest lottery players in the world, spending the equivalent of1.8 per cent of the country’s gross domestic product of about $1.6 trillion, said Mauro Guillén, a professor at the University of Pennsylvania’s Wharton business school and the co-author of a study on lotteries.