The Virginia Lottery pays 5 cents on the dollar for lottery sales. Cash-ins are worth one cent/dollar. Do the math. That's five percent, not even a mealy profit, and it ties up the store's cash after cash-ins and makes the store liable for huge wads of cash after big sales days. "It's all in numbers," they say, "it adds up." Bullshit. It adds up to a lot of work for peanuts out of a noticeably bulging pie. Some of these sad scratch addicts will need to be rung through the register 50 to 60 times before they're satisfied that they're just not gonna see the "fifty" today. That sucks. And if they do hit, they'll just turn around and slowly, painfully spend all of that money on more tickets.

"Jesus Christ!" I want to exclaim, "When are you going to just get a clue and quit while you're behind?"

Convenience stores are supposed to be in-and-out affairs - you get what you want, you pay, you leave - but the lottery has turned them into little gambling lounge/mini-casinos. Now you've got people hanging around, scratch, scratch, scratching, leaving little piles of grey scratch dust on all the surfaces and groceries in the place. When the store gets hectic and the line gets 10 people deep - at lunch hour, for instance - it really sucks to have one dude turning around and being every third person.