No More Cheap Dreams of a Jackpot

The cost of a dream has gone up.  The BC Lottery Corporation announced that they will be increasing the price of 6/49 and BC 49 tickets starting May 30, 2004. The ads have been running for weeks now, pumping up the Bigger Jackpots with fanfare and a hefty media buy.

Oh, and that the ticket price is doubling too.  It's still pocket change, but it's now a toonie you'll need to dig up now for your chance at chance.  We have only ourselves to blame.  You see the lottery people have been watching us, making note of our game playing behaviour and this change is a direct result of our lackadaisical attitude toward the "smaller" jackpots.

Guilty as Charged

I'm guilty of it. I can't really explain it, but when the jackpot is "only" $2.5 million, I don't go out of my way to get a ticket. In fact, I have caught myself dissing the smaller jackpots - only $2.5 million, well that's not worth my dollar.  I am not alone.  British Columbians react to the jackpot.  When the jackpot is small, we buy up to 11 percent of the tickets nationwide, but when that jackpot gets up there, we get motivated.  When the jackpot is over $10 million, up to 14 percent of all tickets in Canada are sold in B.C.

What is it about those big jackpots that get us off the couch and out to the retailer?

Perhaps the reality of life here is to blame. That $2.5 million really doesn't go far on the West Coast.  Let's see: You have to do the right thing by divvying it up between your family members and friends, who swore they would share with you if they'd won. Then you take the obligatory star-style, extended holiday, snag a moderate West Side home . . . before you know it, the windfall is gone and you're begging for your old job back.

Or perhaps it is that the Super 7 (with its lower odds, and lower per play price) routinely has higher jackpots. And, since the odds are ridiculous anyway, you might as well go for the big one. Whatever the reason, our penchant for the big bucks has triggered the first change in the 20-year history of the 6/49.

The global lotto

Before you rue the downfall of our greed-infested society, take a global look. This is not a local trend. Bigger jackpots are the order of the day in many countries worldwide.  Take Powerball in the U.S.  This game is a multi-state lottery and the jackpots have crept over the $300 million a few times (they have to pay tax so the take home is only half of that).  The individual states were having trouble garnering interest when the jackpots were based on their state participation alone. They combined efforts to make the pay outs bigger. To ensure that rollovers would push the jackpots even higher, they made the game ridiculously hard to win.  The winner must match 6 numbers from 42.  Seems easier than ours, but the last ball is drawn from a separate batch of balls, so the chance plummets to 1 in 80 million. The odds are lost on most people and the focus is on the mega-jackpot.

On the other side of the world, New Zealand has a similar game to our 6/49 and just recently made changes to increase the jackpots after noting a similar disinterest in the smaller pots.  It's the same story in Europe, where a new game called Camelot was created with the express purpose of bad odds leading to big jackpots.

It's not a problem…really

 

So, small comfort, I'm just riding a global gambling wave. Many people are reluctant to admit that buying lottery tickets is gambling, but it is. And many people gamble outside of their means.  A study in the Quarterly Journal of Economics found that the people who are dissatisfied with their income are most likely to play the lottery.  People, in other words, who don't have extra money to be throwing away.

BCLC has a mandate to address the social issues associated with lottery play and earmarks a percentage of all revenue to support various programs.  Their web site reports that 4 percent of British Columbians have a moderate gambling problem. A survey taken by the consumer group Consumer Federation of America found that over a quarter of the people surveyed believed that winning the lottery was their best chance at gaining wealth in their lifetime. They had little or no understanding of the odds against them.

Odds Are…

It's nice to know that, with the new game, the chance of winning "something" is going to get better. The BCLC has introduced a new, easier to win $5 prize making the chances of winning 1 in 32 (from 1 in 54).  Great, but we've already made it clear in our buying habits that we aren't in it for the pocket change. We want big bucks, no whammies. But the odds of me hitting all six numbers have not changed at all. The chances of winning the jackpot remain one in almost 14 million.

To put that small a number into perspective, it would take a magnifying glass seven times stronger than the ones used to build Nano-technology to see it. If you bought a thousand tickets everyday, you should hit the jackpot in about 38.25 years. 

Twice the bling

The advertisements for 6/49 beckon us to dream. What would it be like to win the lottery!  And now that the dream has gone up in price, we get to dream a little bigger. We can dream about a paycheck as big as Cameron Diaz's instead of Jenny McCarthy's.  We can build a house on the West Side instead of the East, vacation annually in the Caribbean Islands instead of the Gulf Islands wearing our bling-bling rather than mere bling. For an extra dollar, our dreams can be in line with the coveted wealth that we see everyday on Entertainment Tonight, The Apprentice, and countless celebrity profiles. 

Wouldn't it be nice to win twice as much and be twice as happy?  That's the logic the Lotteries are counting on, and my toonie here seems to agree.

Valerie McTavish is a television writer and producer living in Vancouver.