Naples Florida Weekly
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The new price of HOPE

Forgett the down economy andnd a price increase.e. Florida Lottery’s revenues continuee to soar.



 

WHEN THE FLORIDA LOTTERY Commission decided to double the price of tickets last month to $2 for its original 6-number drawing game, known for 32 years as the Florida Lotto, the move caused some grumbling from players, whose complaints could probably be heard in store lines from Palm Beach to Punta Gorda.

It didn’t appear to stop them from buying tickets, however.

“I don’t think they needed to raise it, it’s just them getting richer,” concluded a woman named Janet (she wouldn’t provide her last name), buying a handful of potential winners including scratch-offs and five Florida Lotto tickets, all from a Handy store on State Road 80 in east Lee County, last week.

“But it’s good for schools,” she added, hopefully.

Not this year — not public schools, at least — but she didn’t know that.

The Florida Lottery says its lotto contributions alone since 1988 have included “$8 billion for Florida’s students and schools.”

Customers line up to buy and check lottery tickets at a West Palm Beach Publix that’s ranked No. 9 in the state for ticket sales. SCOTT SIMMONS / FLORIDA WEEKLY

Customers line up to buy and check lottery tickets at a West Palm Beach Publix that’s ranked No. 9 in the state for ticket sales. SCOTT SIMMONS / FLORIDA WEEKLY

That’s just under 22% of the total $37 billion the Florida Lottery says it has provided from sales of its now broad bouquet of game options “to enhance education and (send) more than 840,000 students to college through the Bright Futures Program” — the primary beneficiary of contributions to education from the Florida Lottery.

Bright Futures is not means-tested, so recipients get the scholarship no matter what their family circumstances may be — all of it money funded by games heavily marketed to lower-income neighborhoods, analysts point out.

But this year, for the first time, Florida’s school districts are not benefiting even in a small way from the Florida Lottery.

In the district where Janet was buying lottery tickets, for example, “Part of the (state) budget typically includes dollars from the Florida Lottery,” the district’s annual report explains.

“Funds are provided primarily in the form of School Recognition, which provides financial awards to schools that demonstrate sustained or significantly improved student performance. It is a misconception that districts receive substantial funding from the Florida lottery as the allocation would not run District operations for one day.”

STANSEL

STANSEL

There’s another kicker, too: “In FY21, Governor Ron DeSantis vetoed these dollars from the state budget, resulting in an approximate $3.7 million revenue loss in this category for the District.”

So no Florida school district now gets anything from the Florida Lottery.

That aside, “the FLORIDA LOTTO (game) alone has created over 1,000 (off the Lottery’s 3,000 total) millionaires,” Lottery officials say.

As they describe it in press releases, the new $2 ticket for “Florida’s flagship draw game, FLORIDA LOTTO,” is good for everybody. Players will have a bigger roll-over prize if no one wins a particular week’s drawing, with better odds, and the game will ultimately provide more money to the general economy, and to education, they say.

 

The Lotto also will come with “a prize multiplier on every ticket, a new prize level for players matching two off six numbers, and a new add-on feature that gives players the chance to win up to $250,000 in additional cash prizes for $1 more.”

So now, perhaps, the only thing that still hasn’t changed since the 1980s is the ambition of players: to win big. To become a millionaire.

Intent on joining their rare tribe, the tribe of millionaires, Janet and others waiting in line to buy lottery tickets last week also were purchasing hope, a commodity well worth the price off admission, it seems.

Hope long has been recognized as part of the value of lottery tickets, even if it can’t be quantified in dollar values by officials such as the “accountant supervisor” in Florida’s Department off Lottery. The account supervisor paid to keep track of everything but hope in the Lottery books is paid a salary and benefits of $153,157, according transparencyflorida.gov.

Lottery Economics 101

Four years ago, a marketing professor at the University of Florida who studied the lottery, Alan Cooke, offered this observation to reporters at the Sun-Sentinel in Fort Lauderdale, writing about the lottery then, when annual sales had been just over $5 billion in 2015: “For those people who are in circumstances where their continued cash flow is not ever going to allow them to get out of debt, why wouldn’t they buy scratchers? It gives them hope.”

It probably gives Lottery officials hope, too, since their annual revenues have now climbed to the near $7 billion mark.

They see that as a powerful investment in the state’s economy, even if economists themselves may question the notion and almost 70% of scratch tickets, for example, are sold in lowerincome neighborhoods, analysts have shown.

“The Florida Lottery reinvests nearly 98 percent of its revenue back into Florida’s economy through prize payouts, commissions to more than 13,000 Florida retailers and transfers to education,” the Florida Lottery announces at the bottom of every press release. “Since 1988, Florida Lottery games have paid more than $71 billion in prizes and made nearly 3,000 people millionaires.”

But Dr. Dean Stansel, a nationally recognized economist and senior research fellow in the Bridwell Institute for Economic Freedom at Southern Methodist University — he once taught economics at Florida Gulf Coast University — puts all that in perspective.

“Government-run lotteries are essentially voluntary forms of taxation,” he explains. “They provide a way to finance some of the state government budget without using actual taxes. If they were eliminated, taxes would have to rise or spending would have to fall.

“From an individual perspective, a lottery is clearly not a wise investment. However, for those who enjoy gambling and can afford it, they can provide a safe way to do so.”

Economically speaking, there are downsides, he says.

“One downside is that, in my opinion, running a lottery is not a legitimate function of government.

“Another potential downside is that since lottery tickets are purchased disproportionately by lower income residents, the fiscal impact is borne mostly by those who can least afford it.”

Finally, he points out, claims that the Florida Lottery adds billions of dollars to the economy should be viewed with skepticism.

“While state lotteries are often sold as being sources for higher education spending, the reality is often quite different.

Since government revenue is fungible, the new dollars brought in from lotteries are often offset by lower amounts used from other taxes.”

In effect, the lottery becomes a tax on poorer people, whatever else it also may be.

The top 10 stores in the state for lottery ticket sales last year — a list that appeared in the Sun-Sentinel using data provided by the Florida Lottery — included two stores in Palm Beach County, both Publix supermarkets, one in West Palm Beach, and one in Loxahatchee. SPECIAL TO FLORIDA WEEKLY

The top 10 stores in the state for lottery ticket sales last year — a list that appeared in the Sun-Sentinel using data provided by the Florida Lottery — included two stores in Palm Beach County, both Publix supermarkets, one in West Palm Beach, and one in Loxahatchee. SPECIAL TO FLORIDA WEEKLY

Ticket to fairy tale

With the new $2 lotto ticket, people who pick all six numbers will likely win big. Janet could be one.

But people who pick three, four or five numbers might not win as much as they would have before the price increase, analysts of the new lottery upgrades say.

On any given day, a player will now spend $10 for the five Florida lotto tickets she would have walked away with for $5 in each of the last 32 years.

It’s a pretty good bet most people who play won’t let that deter them.

When the state adopted its government sanctioned gambling program in 1988, Ronald Reagan was president and Bob Martinez was Florida’s 40th governor. George Michael’s song, “Faith,” was No. 1 on the charts, movie tickets were $4 or $5, and gasoline averaged less than $1 a gallon.

Things changed over time, but not the flagship Florida Lotto.

Lottery officials added many additional game opportunities and variations for players, they raised the prices for tickets on multi-state draws such as Powerball, and they always left the original game alone.

But now in a year that seems to compel more change than any since 2001, that’s gone the way of everything else, too, and the price of the original ticket has finally doubled.

Why now? Lottery officials didn’t respond to Florida Weekly by press time to answer that question or others about how or where they do the most business.

“The Florida Lottery is in receipt of your public records request,” they wrote. “Your request is under review and we will provide a timeframe for completion, along with any associated costs as soon as possible.”

Meanwhile, lottery players adjusted quickly, buying the $2 Lotto ticket on the twice-a-week draw in the traditional game, or seeking prizes big or smaller in any one of a seeming blizzard of other games now available, both scratch-offs and draws.

They also were buying tickets for the multi-state drawings in which Florida participates.

It’s hard even for regular players to keep track.

The Florida Lottery now offers almost 100 scratch-off games, with ticket prices ranging from $1 up to $30, and big money draw games such as Powerball, Mega Millions, Fast Play, Cash 4 Life, and more.

Sometimes — roughly once in every 23 million tries, according to some analysts looking at big-win odds in the Lotto — a ticket becomes a fairly tale, whether you spent $1 or $2, or more.

In Cash 4 Life, for example, Robert Sims, 61, of Brookwood, Ala., crossed the Florida border going south, then pulled in to the Southern Pit Stop, in Century.

A town in the western Panhandle town closer to Mobile than to Tallahassee, Century’s population is roughly 1,800. Mr. Sims purchased a winning ticket for $2, and everything changed. In a news release only a week before the presidential election, Lottery officials announced him as a winner.

Now, Mr. Sims probably doesn’t care who won the White House. Because he won the lottery. He’s one of a seeming army of Alabamans who come across the border and inject huge revenues into stores selling lottery tickets in often tiny towns in the Panhandle.

Alabama never has had a lottery, although state government there is leaning toward establishing one, news reports say.

In return for his $2 ticket purchase, Mr. Sims will now receive a lump sum of $7 million, rather than the $1,000 a day for life he might have chosen — in which case he would have to live 20 years to take in more than $7 million.

And Southern Pit Stop, a little retail location on the main road, will receive $10,000 for selling that ticket, officials said.

While the 13,000 retailers selling lottery tickets in Florida’s 67 counties get paid to do so, most are unlikely to sell a big winner anytime soon, just as most players are unlikely to win big, like Mr. Sims, anytime soon.

But the stores do a robust business, and in sometimes unexpected places.

The top 10 stores in the state for lottery ticket sales last year — a list that appeared in the Sun-Sentinel using data provided by the Florida Lottery — included two stores in Palm Beach County, both Publix supermarkets, one in West Palm Beach, and one in Loxahatchee.

They came in at nine and 10 on that list, respectively, with sales listed at about $3.404 million at the South Military Trail Publix in West Palm, where store clerks were selling lottery tickets to a steady stream of customers last week, too, promising another good year for the state lottery.

That store at South Military Trail and Summit Boulevard, about 1.3 miles west of the president’s Trump International Golf Course and just shy of six miles from his Winter White House at Mar-a-Lago, is in the heart of suburbia. It’s also an area surrounded by working- and middle-class neighborhoods, some of them hardscrabble.

At noon one recent Wednesday, people of all ages queued up to buy and check tickets at the customer service desk. Others gathered at a Lotto vending machine. The lines showed no sign of abating.

Publix officials at the store’s Lakeland headquarters did not respond by late last week to Florida Weekly queries asking about lottery revenues in their stores and seeking the locations of their top stores for lottery ticket sales in Palm Beach, Collier, Lee and Charlotte counties.

But the 2019 list of the top 10 stores for net sales lists the first, second and third all in the Panhandle near Century, each a tiny town proximate to the Alabama border: the State Line Gift Shop in McDavid, Fortune Liquors in Campbellton and the Friendly Mini Mart in Bonifay, with sales ranging from $4.5 million to more than $5.5 million.

The lesson seems obvious: You don’t have to be a big guy to win the lottery, or beat the competition. ¦

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