Unlucky Numbers

You can easily feel overwhelmed by the glaring lights and neon advertisements as you walk into many convenience stores around Stuyvesant High School. These plentiful colorful posters and product signs are designed to distract, which makes sense considering their significant success at capturing customers’ attention. On the rare occasions when my dad drives me home, I catch a glimpse of the apex of American marketing. Enormous billboards line Manhattan’s highways, advertising everything from SAT tutors to injury lawyers and the most common of all: the weekly lotto jackpots.

Lotteries are long-standing traditions that have been grandfathered into many communities. You may have heard of or even participated in lottery pools—groups splitting the prices of tickets as well as the possible rewards. Many people participate for fun and spend a few dollars for the off chance that they win millions. Even though everyone knows the odds are severely stacked against them, year after year over a hundred million people in America come back for more.

In 2021, the United States government made $26.9 billion from lotteries across America. This money came from the 24 percent cut the IRS takes from lucky winners annually, which significantly reduces the payout winners receive. Lotteries are worse than casinos, not just because they make no attempt to disguise the taxes levied on successful contestants. You can at least attribute some measure of skill to gambling games such as blackjack and poker, whereas lotteries are pure chance, heavily taxed, and worst of all, incredibly accessible to the public.

The issue arises from the fact that most lotteries are perceived as low-stakes. Spending two dollars per ticket per year is pretty negligible in the grand scheme of things, so buying a ticket is perceived as not that big of a deal. If you already have one ticket, you might as well double your chances at the big jackpot and buy another. The cycle continues until many small payments amount to thousands, if not tens of thousands, of dollars down the drain. This money drain does not occur in high-income families since typically people below the poverty line frequently purchase lottery tickets in hopes of getting out of their financial troubles, not realizing that they are more likely to dig themselves deeper into debt. 

Specifically, America's poorest households spend around 33 times more of their income than richer households on lottery tickets, and many rationalize these purchases with the fact that the cost of buying so many tickets is nullified if they win. The thing is, they never do. On average, a single ticket in a Powerball or Mega Millions lottery has around a one in 300 million chance of resulting in a top prize, and only around two percent of contestants break even. Despite the odds, most Americans buy a lottery ticket each year, and more than half of the revenue generated is from just a quarter of participants.

Most individuals carry with them a belief of exclusion from everyone else—one that influences many of their decisions regarding chance. Powerball and Mega Millions capitalize on this feeling by manipulating everyone to believe that they will be the lucky winner. From an outsider’s perspective, it can seem ridiculous that so many people routinely feed into obvious money drains, but the perceived low stakes and high reward cause more than 100 million Americans to discard a few dollars every year.

Perhaps the biggest marketing strategy lottery corporations employ is turning the individual act of purchasing a lottery ticket into a group affair. Many workplaces create lottery pools, splitting ticket costs and the unlikely reward. By normalizing these systems, a previously private decision turns into an intense fear of missing out. Additionally, the concept of splitting the prize opens a door to a myriad of lawsuits, such as the famous case of a woman suing her nephew over a $1.2 million jackpot originally split between them. 

The simple solution is to not buy into the frenzy. Lotteries are little more than commercialized gambling, and people become just as addicted to gambling as they do to alcohol or chemical substances. An obsession with trying to win an impossible game leads to psychological disturbances as well as financial detriments. Stop playing the game you’ll never win, and delegate the funds to actual necessities. As minors, it can be difficult to find any meaning in the psychology of lotteries, but the thoughts that go through a ticket buyer’s mind echo in other aspects of daily life. It can be exciting to take risks, and it becomes easy to justify them when we don’t immediately feel the effects.