I keep seeing commercials for the Heart & Stroke Lottery on TV and it struck me a bit odd. I remember back when the hospitals and charities started putting on lotteries, their tickets were in the $100 range (and $100 was worth more 10 years ago!). Now I noticed that the H&S lottery only cost $25 for a ticket – but I also noticed that they weren’t advertising their material prizes; just cash ones.
I just did a quick check on their website, and it seems their prizes are different than what I saw on the commercial. It turns out that I saw the commercial for their calendar lottery where they were giving away 3x$5000/day, with special $10,000/week and $100,000/month draws over a year. So that works out to a payout of $7.195 million dollars. There’s also 2000x$25/mth winners which brings their grand total to $7.795 million dollars in prizes.
In order to break even, at $25/ticket, they have to sell at least 311,800 tickets. That’s a lot of tickets! That doesn’t account for all the marketing and overhead needed to run the operation; so there must be a lot of people in Canada playing this lottery in order for them to make money on it!
Hi! and welcome to the eclectic personal blog of Kevin Quan. Come in, stay awhile, peek into the nooks & crannies, and learn a bit about me and my interests.