When 19-year old Rosa Dominguez won the top prize of $555,555 from a $5 Power 5 Scratcher ticket, Kelly McCarthy of ABC News says the lucky teen told the California State Lottery she was “so nervous I just wanted to cry.”
When she won $100,000 from a $5 Lucky Fortune scratcher less than a week later, she said she planned to go shopping and purchase a new car.
After winning the California State Lottery twice in a single week, Ms. Dominguez evidently no longer feels such victories call for tears.
Dominguez purchased the first ticket, the Power 5 scratcher worth $555,555, at Eagle Energy gas station in Paso Robles, CA, when she stopped for gas on her way home from Arizona.
The second winning ticket came from a Valero station in Monterey County, 75 miles north of Paso Robles.
The California Lottery “did not immediately respond” to ABC News’ request for comment. Presumably, they were too busy studying the algorithms that allowed Dominguez to take home $655,000 in under a week.
Then again, now that Dominguez’s story has hit the news, thousands upon thousands of California denizens, many of whom haven’t bought a lottery ticket in years, are sure to look twice at the scratch-offs as they wait for the cashier.
It would be interesting to conduct exit polls at California gas stations, asking customers who bought lottery tickets whether Dominguez’s story had prompted them to do so. In all likelihood, if you added up every affirmative response you received, and multiplied that sum by the $5 price of a California scratch-off ticket, you’d wind up with a total far greater than the $650,000 Dominguez won.
Even when it looks like the house is losing, the house probably comes out way ahead.
Once in a while, though, one lucky person can take the house for a ride and walk away with a whole bunch of money and a story he/she will tell at parties for the rest of his/her life.
If Arkansas couple, Stephen and Terri Weaver, happen to hear Dominguez’s story at a party, though, they might roll their eyes, and then top it with one of their own.
The Weavers bookended a fishing trip with pit stops at T-Ricks convenience store 60 miles outside of Little Rock. They bought a lottery ticket each time they stopped.
According to Time Magazine’s Melissa Locker, The Weavers’ first ticket turned out to be worth $1 million dollars, the second a mere $50,000.
Ever since, fishing enthusiasts all around the world have been reminding their significant others that taking a day off at the lake could be a million-dollar plan.
Of course, the statistics give the disapproving significant others plenty of reasons to be dismissive. In the fiscal year that ended in June 2016, the California lottery reported $6.3 billion in sales, a marked increase from $5.5 billion the prior fiscal year. $4.4 billion of 2016’s revenue came from scratch off tickets.
Though no sales data was available for any subsequent fiscal year, as of 2016, California State Lottery revenues had increased every year since 2010, largely due to an increase in sales of scratch-off tickets like the one—the two—with which Dominguez won.
Yes, payoffs are directly correlated to sales revenue, but not to such a degree that profits are threatened.
In 2016, California Lottery Director Hugo Lopez called the revenue increase “a great achievement for the California Lottery.” So, payoffs must not have been cutting into the bottom line too substantially.
Still, Rosa Dominguez made significant cuts in that bottom line twice in one week. The Weavers did so twice in a single day.
By all means, go out and buy a lottery ticket or two rather than a bag of Skittles and a Coke. Just don’t start thinking you’ll be the next Rosa Dominguez.
Then again, you might be.
