Lottery Fever Still High; Sales Triple Expectations

California’s infatuation with the new state lottery continued unabated Friday, as lines of eager ticket buyers snaked through the aisles of neighborhood shops and supermarkets on the second day of the game.

In some cases Friday, anxious players were waiting on sidewalks for stores to open. Many retailers ran out of tickets and had to stand in long lines at regional lottery offices to get more.

And while many store owners reported that the lottery was good for business, there also were early signs that it was good for street crime.

For the second time in two days, Orange County lottery officials reported that lottery tickets had been stolen. Keith Van Hoesen Chevron on North Magnolia in Anaheim lost 89 tickets and an undisclosed sum of money in a robbery at 2:55 a.m. Friday, lottery agent Al Romero reported.

“Give me the money and I want your lottery tickets,” the suspect allegedly ordered. The stolen lottery tickets have since been invalidated, Romero said, and anyone who tries to cash in tickets from that batch probably will be treated as a suspect. Lottery agents and Anaheim police were continuing their investigation.

Across the state, officials estimated that 21.4 million tickets were sold in the lottery’s first 24 hours, almost three times more than had been projected. Although officials could not estimate Orange County’s ticket sales to date, they said about 300 retailers came to the lottery’s Anaheim headquarters Friday to obtain second orders totaling 2.8 million tickets. County retailers had picked up 1.7 million additional tickets a day earlier, the first day of the lottery.

Also Friday, 295 Orange County residents forged their way through the crowded lottery office lobby to fill out claim forms for $100 to $5,000 prizes. Asked if they minded waiting in line to claim their prizes, winner after winner smiled and said no.

Some had a special reason for smiling: 60 of Friday’s Orange County winners had tickets worth $5,000 each, the largest instant payoff in the “scratch-off” ticket game, regional director James Braxton said. (Winners of $100 or more in the instant game are eligible for another game with prizes up to $2 million.) Across the state, there were 179 verified winners of $5,000 by Friday.

Distribution Problems

The unexpectedly huge demand for lottery tickets caused some distribution headaches.

Lottery director Mark Michalko said his workers had tried to warn store owners of the danger of under-ordering, “but we met some resistance.”

“We’re trying to handle these (replacement) orders as best we can now,” Michalko added.

He said most lottery offices will stay open today to handle the flood of reorders.

The scene at Anaheim’s Stadium Liquors was typical Friday as repeat players, many of them ignoring Thursday’s losses, visited the small store to buy more tickets. Store owner Tony LoPiccolo reported Friday that he had sold 10,000 tickets--and a lot of other merchandise--in the lottery’s first day and had purchased another 10,000 tickets for Friday.

Other store owners in Anaheim had to wait as long as four hours to pick up more tickets.

Tom Lewis, owner of an El Toro market, said he ran through his initial order of 10,000 tickets by Friday morning and was picking up another batch of 10,000.

No Complaints

Lewis, however, was not complaining.

“It’s a traffic-generator. It creates a lot of excitement,” he said, especially when customers begin screaming that they have won.

The mood was different, though, around Video Town in El Toro.

“My sales have dropped,” manager Jay Lee lamented. “I expected people would come to buy lottery tickets and also look around the store. But they just buy lottery tickets, and they go.”

Orange County-based Alpha Beta Markets had ordered about $8 million in tickets for the first game in what lottery officials said was probably the largest retail order in the state. But by Friday, because of an apparent computer mixup, the chain was still missing about 200,000 tickets, Dick Washington, a lottery distribution official, said. Washington was trying to make sure those tickets arrived Friday. Like many other retailers, Alpha Beta was not happy with the lottery’s distribution system, Washington said, but the ticket sales appeared to be helping other sales, and market officials had said they “were happy with the experience.”

In the rural areas, the run on lottery tickets was just as fierce.

Had to Reorder

In Redding, district lottery manager Sandra Jones said that one-third of her backcountry customers had to reorder by Friday afternoon, but they were not complaining.

“The lottery has made my life exciting,” said a clerk at the Buckhorn bar in rural McArthur in Lassen County.

The 7-Eleven convenience store chain, which has 1,100 outlets around the state, reported that the sale of tickets had fallen off slightly Friday but was still “dramatic,” according to chain official Don Cowan. The stores sold 1.2 million tickets statewide in the first two hours of the lottery, he added.

Meanwhile, lottery advertising on radio and television continued, in a move to try to keep sales booming.

Brad Fornaciari, in charge of lottery advertising, said the games will be promoted daily in every media market of the state.

Fornaciari said the current television blitz, which will run through Oct. 21, features “all different groups of Californians playing the lottery and having fun . . . working couples, people riding in a pedicabs, San Francisco people, factory workers, all kinds.”

“We’re just trying to let people know that playing the lottery is fun, that it’s played by a wide variety of people,” he said. “There are some misconceptions about who plays the lottery, and we just want to show it’s as broad-based as the state.”

The lottery will spend about $3 million on publicity for its first game, Fornaciari said.