The Power of the Game

People do a lot of things with their Lottery winnings. Some of them are pretty great. Some of them…

The Lottery is a fixture in the United States. Such a fixture that it has come to mean something bigger than the game. “Winning the Lottery” means any stroke of good fortune in the face of chance—a draft pick, a new job, the ideal lifetime partner.

This demonstrates the power of the game in the country’s shared mindset; it’s a Golden Ticket to the world of unlimited possibilities, but way less restrictive than Willy Wonka’s—anyone of sufficient age can step up and take their chances!

With convenience stores selling up to 80 percent of the lottery products purchased in the U.S., it’s easy to picture operators as part-time concierges to a world of good fortune, because they are. What makes the whole set up so interesting, though, is what constitutes good fortune among prizewinners. What they value varies widely in scope, no doubt an understatement.

With yesterday, July 17, being National Lottery Day, we thought it might be appropriate to bring up a few examples of noteworthy things people have done with their cash windfalls. The examples are all over the map:

• John and Linda Kutey worked together with local jurisdictions to build a now-popular water park.
• An anonymous woman donated part of her $1.5 billion winnings to tornado relief in Alabama.
• Jonathan Vagas started his own women’s wrestling show.
• David Copeland bought land on the moon.
• Roy Cockrum has almost single-handedly funded theater in downtown Seattle since 2014.
• And, just for contrast, here’s a list of what most people do with their big prizes.

“If I won the lottery…” is a sentence most everyone has contemplated starting, at least once or twice. When it comes to running a business, however, it’s best not to leave anything to chance. Case in point: lottery scratchers. It’s great to establish your store as a gaming destination, but you don’t want to go broke creating customer excitement; tickets are notoriously hard to keep track of even when the line at the register isn’t three deep.

To make managing lottery scratchers easier for convenience store professionals, SSCS introduced its Lottery Management program. Set up your bins and games, then let the software track sales from the moment you scan your packs into the store. Activity detail and reporting help you cut down on shrinking inventory, while ensuring that your scratcher margins are acceptable and on the rise. Profit doesn’t have to be pure imagination. Give us a call at (800) 972-7277 and we’ll help you see the reality of the situation.