Another unlikely story
The lottery crosses itself up—again
ANOTHER day, another newspaper at your doorstep, another story about the Arkansas lottery’s not doing this or coming up short on that. The real story may be that the lottery’s honchos are just tripping over themselves trying to explain its fiscal troubles. Again.
Last month, the lottery’s director and apologist-in-chief, Bishop Woosley, tried to explain away why the lottery doesn’t rack up the sales it once did. As if that were a bad thing—rather than good news when not as many folks are plunking down their hard-earned cash to gamble in this state’s official, certified, legalized and generally oversold scam.
It would have been much too simple for Director Woosley to just come clean and confess that more folks are catching on to this racket.
Last week, still another story about this state’s lottery appeared on the front page. It turns out that more and more prizes are going unclaimed these days. What’s more, the amounts unclaimed have been going up year after year. Consider:
The first full year the lottery was in business, back in fiscal 2011, $4.84 million in winnings weren’t claimed. The next year, that number rose to $4.89 million. Then $5.19 million in 2013 and another $5.4 million last year.
What can all that mean? That people don’t know they’ve won something? That players aren’t paying sufficient attention? Or that maybe out-of-state types—say, long-haul truckers or tourists—are grabbing and going but not cashing in?
Naturally, reporters asked those running the lottery what they thought about the ever growing amount of unclaimed prizes. One of the lottery’s bigs—spokesman Patrick Ralston— tried to explain it this way, after noting it would be hard to explain at all:
“You could also partially attribute [the rise] to the larger Powerball and Mega Millions jackpots,” he told the paper. “Higher jackpots equal more plays and attract more players. More players and more plays increase the likelihood that a player may not realize they won a smaller prize, or did win a prize but failed to cash the ticket in the time allowed.” The big problem, you see, is that the lottery’s jackpots are too big.
The lottery really needs to get its stories straight. Because just last month Bishop Woosley went before the Lottery Commission to explain why the lottery wasn’t taking the suckers for the usual higher amounts, and one of his “explanations” was that the jackpots offered by Powerball and Mega Millions are too small to attract players.
Always ready with a colorful alibi, The Bishop called this being at the mercy of the Jackpot Beast, if memory and recent archives serve. In the first four months of this fiscal year, the lottery’s revenue has dropped almost 5 percent. But most of that loss was because of the decline in the draw games, Bishop Woosley told his commission.
Oh, if we could only get Powerball up to around $100 million again, all our problems would be solved! Which sounds just like the kind of sucker bait the lottery offers all comers.
Did you get all that? When the Arkansas lottery’s take declines, it’s because Powerball doesn’t offer large enough jackpots and so the suckers stop buying tickets.
But when the amount of unclaimed prizes keeps growing, blame it on Powerball’s attracting too many suckers— so many that winners just forget to pick up their penny-ante prizes.
The lottery has been teaching the rest of us some valuable lessons over the years. The first, which we should have known all along, is that the odds of winning are terrible. The second is that the only sure way to make money off the lottery is to be on its payroll.
Here’s another lesson: When the barkers at the lottery start explaining things, take their spiel the way you would that of any other carny at the State Fair: Smile, nod . . . and back away slowly. And whatever you do, don’t hurry, hurry, hurry, step right up.