Lottery news from http://www.wilsondaily.com/
When repo men recovered an automobile on Monday night for Worrell's Used Cars, the floorboards were littered with lottery scratchers.
Barry Worrell, accounts manager, said this scene hasn't been uncommon since the state's lottery began in March.
"We counted, there was 86 dollars worth of lottery tickets in the floor of the car," Worrell said. "That money could have been used to make part of a payment on the car, instead they spent it on a lottery they didn't win and now they're out a car."
Comparing automobile repossessions for June 2005 and 2006, Worrell said the number has more than doubled.
In June 2005 his company repossessed four cars, but last month they repossessed nine.
A number of the repossessed cars were littered with state lottery scratchers. Overall, repossessions are up 25 percent for the year, he said.
"You've got to get the feeling that the lottery is having an effect," Worrell said. "I'm not saying it's all the lottery's fault, but it's got to have an impact."
Worrell isn't the only businessman to see an impact on sales since the lottery began.
Tommy Traish, owner of Spirit Food Mart on Ward Boulevard, said once he began selling lottery tickets in the spring, he saw sales of the rest of his merchandise drop by about 25 percent.
That drop in sundries sales cost Traish more than the bumper crop in lottery sales. Lottery retailers make 7 percent on each ticket sold. However, food and other merchandise in the convenience stores have a markup of 150-200 percent, he said.
"If you spend all your time with the lottery you're not making nothing," Traish said. He added sales have begun to increase over the past few weeks as lottery sales have declined.
John Hood, president of the John Locke Foundation, said stories like Worrell's should come as no surprise.
"We know that gambling in general does lead some people astray. It leads some people to make disastrously poor choices about their finances," Hood said. He added that there's no way to claim as an absolute that the lottery was the cause of missed payments on automobiles.
"It's legitimate to ask if whether or not the person wouldn't have squandered his money on some other kind of activity instead of buying lottery tickets. But it's an illustration that gambling does have some deleterious social consequences."
Prior to the start of the lottery, Philip Cook, a Duke University public policy professor who has studied lotteries, told the Charlotte Observer that some households would face financial problems because of overplaying the lottery.
The Observer studied the South Carolina lottery over the course of four years and discovered low-income people spend a greater portion of their income on the games than more affluent players.
The study found people earning less than $30,000 a year spent an estimated $627 per household annually, nearly triple the spending of those making more than $50,000.
Hood said it's difficult to establish the lottery's impact on the economy, but he said his guess would be overall, compared to the state's gross domestic product, would mean it's impact is trivial.
"But it's not a trivial issue to ponder the effect of gambling on individual families. That person whose car was repossessed, or whose check bounced ... by the law of averages, that's going to happen," Hood said.
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