Picking a nit with the lottery
You may have read how the state lottery made $24 million during its first five days of sales.
Bully for the lottery.
So late today, I get news alert from the lottery folks that reads in part:
"...sales of the tickets are going very well with the $5 ticket, "$100,000 Carolina Cash," a top seller."
Really?
Well, it depends on how you look at it. The lottery put out these (approximate) figures:
Game/sales
$100,000 Carolina Cash ($5 ticket)/$7,486,961
Blackjack ($2 ticket)/$5,758,655
Tic Tac Toe ($1 ticket)/$5,137,201
NC Education Lottery ($1 ticket)/$5,647,481
So yes, the most cash was generated by the Carolina Cash game. But what game sold the most number of tickets?
That would be the "NC Education Lottery" game which lottery officials said sold 5.6 million tickets at $1 a pop. The Carolina Cash game sold something like 1.49 million tickets at $5 a pop.
I say "something like," because there's another math problem with the amounts handed out by the lottery.
If you sell tickets with a face value of $5 a ticket, your sales totals should all end in "5" or "0," numbers that are multiples of 5. There's no way to multiply 5 by a whole number and get "$7,486,961." So unless there's some sort of discount program, some way to buy a fractional ticket, or something else we don't know about...something is amiss.
Also, the sales figures for the $2 "Blackjack" tickets should all be even numbers. If you multiply "$2" by any number - odd or even - you get an even number. There's not way, without fractions, to sell "$5,758,655" worth of $2 tickets.
Yes, I have an e-mail requesting clarification into the lottery. And yes, I realize that these figures are supposed to be estimates, but they should at least be plausible.
In the mean time, I'm taking all the sales figures given out by the lottery with a big ol' grain of salt.
Update: Here's the response I got from Pam Walker, the spokeswoman for the lottery:
The only way we can extract the data is to take a snapshot at time requested. I asked for the info today, but got response in percentages for each game. I divided the number for sales as of the end of the day yesterday and got the APPROXIMATE numbers.
Comments (2)
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Good eyes, Mark.
Can you also watch how much of this money goes to the school programs it's supposed to?
Posted on April 4, 2006 5:07 PM
Doug: I would guess that most of us scrubby press types up here in Cap City are going to attempt to do that.
Posted on April 4, 2006 5:45 PM