"Inconvenience: Scratch This!"
Everyone likes to win things. I mean, who wouldn’t? It doesn’t matter what it is either. Money, cars, trips to exotic locales. Hell, if someone came up to me with a box of paperclips and said that I won them I would be thrilled to death. What would I do with a box of paperclips? Doesn’t matter, because I won them.
The saying goes “you have to spend money to make money.” This is usually true when you are trying to win something. Most of the time, you have to pay something in order to get a ticket for whatever it is. The most frequently used way for this method is people who gamble in hopes of winning money. Of course, the odds are stacked against people when they are gambling. Some people will spend a little and lose. They accept it and grudgingly move on, only down a few dollars. However, there are some that will sit and spend far more money than they end up winning, just for the sake of winning something. As I stand here and type this while working, I glance to my right and see a prime example of this. I see the scratch tickets that we sell.
If there was one thing that I could get rid of inside the store (other than the customers themselves), it would have to be the lottery tickets that we sell. They are a far bigger pain in my ass than they are worth. Good example of how much they are worth: out of every dollar that gets spent by people here for lotto, the store gets a penny. For all you math whiz’s out there, that’s one percent. For me, that isn’t shit, and just not worth it.
A good deal of the time, there are no problems with it. People come in, buy a pop, some smokes, and maybe a ticket. Okay, nothing wrong with that. The rest of the time is where the problems start coming in. Some people think that they are the only ones who exist, or are at least the only ones that exist who matter, and when they buy a ticket they feel that they have to stand right in front of the counter and scratch it. Never mind that they are in the way, never mind the fact that no one can get around them to buy anything, never mind that I ask them nicely to move. They’re too busy trying to see if they got three numbers that match so that they can win two dollars. <b>Woooooooo~!</b> Those people are usually geriatric and shouldn’t even be out in the general public to begin with.
The other people that I have a problem with are the ones who will go to any expense to win something, no matter how much they have to spend. I’ve seen people stand in here and spend over thirty dollars just to win one dollar. It doesn’t matter to them that they are that far in the hole, as long as they have something to show for it. Of course, it isn’t hardly anything to show, but whatever. These people also piss me off because while I am trying to get things done, they just stand there and scratch and scratch and scratch. On average the people that do this spend over twenty minutes doing it, and that’s twenty minutes that I could be doing something that actually getting things done, but <b>NOOOO</b>, I have to be ready when they want to waste more fucking money. If I’m not right there, they’ll get all upset. Why, they might get so upset that they would go somewhere else…that gives me an idea.
The odds aren’t even very good for the tickets to begin with. The average for all the tickets we have is that you stand a chance of winning something every one out of seven or eight tickets. That just doesn’t seem right to me that someone is willing to spend eight dollars just to maybe win one. Of course sometimes the tickets themselves defy the odds and you could go longer without getting anything, or you could win something sooner. Of course, you don’t have to just spend one dollar on a ticket if that isn’t enough for you. Right now, we have tickets for one, two, three, five and ten dollars. How would you like to test the odds on a ten dollar ticket? I know that I really wouldn’t want to.
There are times however, that I have bought the pricey tickets. Not just because I “have a feeling about this one” or any crap like that. I have somewhat of a system for buying tickets when I do. I shadow other people when they buy them. If someone buys a bunch of tickets all at once, I might buy one of the same kind that they got after they leave if they didn’t win anything. It drastically improves my odds if someone buys a bunch and get nothing, because then it’s probably due to pay out at least something. Of course, it’s not a science or anything, so sometimes I’ll win, sometimes I’ll lose. However, I have won far more than I have paid, so it does work for the most part.
Now, you would think that I couldn’t possibly get blamed for people losing on scratch tickets, but I can, have, and will be. Some people will just come in and want a ticket, and they don’t care which one they get, so now it’s up to <b>me</b> to pick a one ticket out of the plethora that we have that will win them something. If I pick wrong, I get blamed, and I get yelled at. “Well, you were too chickenshit to pick something” is one of my usual responses to people. Look, if I knew exactly what tickets were going to win, don’t you think that I would buy them? Then, if I bought them and won a nice chunk of cash, what would be left for them to buy? Either way, they would end up losing. It’s not like I give a shit enough about anyone to actually try to give them a better chance of winning. I know very few of the people that come in from Adam, and they think that just because I am doing my job, that means that I have to insure that they will win more money just because they are who they are. Uh, no. I don’t know you, that means I don’t give a shit about you. Even if I did know them well, I highly doubt that even then I would care enough to try to guess accurately. I’ve proved that enough times in the past, and will continue to do so in the future.
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