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 state gambling game.

“I can hardly move my fingers, they’re so stiff from ringing up the cash register,” said a clerk at Grand Central Market in downtown Los Angeles, which sold 4,000 tickets Thursday and another couple of thousand by midafternoon Friday.

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

Many store owners reported that the lottery was good for business.

Officials estimated 21.4 million tickets were sold in the lottery’s first 24 hours, almost three times more than had been projected. There were 179 verified winners of $5,000 by Friday, the largest instant payoff in the “scratch-off” ticket game. Winners of $100 in the instant game are eligible for another game with larger prizes of as much as $2 million.

The unexpectedly huge demand caused some distribution headaches.

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

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

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

The scene in Los Angeles’ Boyle Heights was typical Friday, as repeat players--most of them ignoring Thursday losses--and happy store owners reported customers buying other things along with lottery tickets.

Rita Osa, 29, was back at the Camera Liquor Store Friday for another $34 worth of tickets for her mother, Lila Armejo. Armejo spent $80 on the game Thursday and won only a few dollars.

“This is household money and wait until my father gets here, he’s going to kill her,” Osa said.

At a nearby check-cashing outlet, business also was brisk. Some people cashed their welfare checks and bought three or four lottery tickets before leaving. By 1 p.m. Friday, the check-cashing outlet had sold more than 1,000 lottery chances.

Asked what could be done about the lure of the lottery for the poor, one of the most persistent criticisms of the game, Michalko said he had no answers.

Target Group

“They are not our target group,” Michalko said. “We don’t want people playing with money they don’t have. We want people to play only with discretionary money . . . and we’ve made it very clear to people who our target audience is. Beyond that, we cannot control these activities.”

Around the state, there was a mixture of eager buyers waiting for tickets and agitated retailers trying to keep calm in long reorder lines. In Anaheim, some store owners 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 tickets.

However, Lewis was not one of those griping.

“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.”

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

Had to Reorder

In Redding, district lottery manager Sandra Jones said one-third of her back-country customers had to reorder by Friday afternoon.

However, they were not complaining, Jones said.

“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 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, Cowan said.

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

Brad Fornaciari, in charge of advertising for the lottery, said the games will be plugged 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 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.