LYNN — Despite the restrictions of the COVID-19 pandemic, Massachusetts Lottery sales have stayed strong, generating greater sales in the second half of 2020 than it did over the same time frame the previous year.
“The lottery made adjustments,” said Massachusetts Lottery Executive Director Mike Sweeney. “And I think that the willingness of our internal team to implement changes really helped us get back the way that we needed to.”
He cited new institutional partnerships with the Boston Celtics, Boston Bruins, and University of Massachusetts, Amherst, as developments that helped the lottery succeed in spite of the pandemic.
The organization sold $2.723 billion of products from July to December 2020, a 2 percent increase over the same period pre-pandemic.
In Lynn, lottery sales took a hit during the beginning of the pandemic, but have since bounced back, with $63.14 million in sales from July 2020 to January 2021.
Spread out over a full year, these numbers would amount to $108.24 million in sales, which represents an increase over pre-pandemic figures. From July 1, 2018 to June 2019, Lynn sold $104.44 million, which amounts to almost $4 million less.
“People always like to gamble,” said Barry D. Calvani, the co-owner of Cal’s News, a Lynn convenience store located on Central Avenue. He reported that the store had seen an uptick in lottery sales in recent months.
“Some people buy them like popcorn,” he said of the $30 scratch tickets that sit in a case on his counter.
The sales at Cal’s were likely bolstered by the fact that the store sold a $1 million scratch ticket in December.
Up until that win, the store had been uniquely unlucky, never selling a million dollar ticket in nearly 40 years of offering Massachusetts Lottery products.
“We had never sold a million-dollar scratch ticket before, and we were the butt of many jokes for many years,” said Calvani.
The situation had become so much of a running joke that two months before the win, Cal’s had been the subject of a news story highlighting that distinction.
The streak of bad luck was finally broken last year, when one of their $30 scratch tickets hit for a million dollar payout, for which Cal’s received a $10,000 dollar bonus.
The Massachusetts Lottery has been a big part of Cal’s business since it was created in 1971, with the store’s business cards stating that it is the “#1 Lottery Agent of the North Shore.”
“Those are the lines we used to get for the lottery,” he said, showing a picture of the store in the 1980s, packed with customers buying tickets. “Crazy, right?”
The overall lottery sales numbers in Massachusetts increased, despite a 12.4 percent decline in Keno sales, which generally make up 20 percent of the lottery’s sales annually.
The declining Keno numbers were offset by a 5.8 percent increase in scratch ticket sales, which make up 70 percent of sales, said Sweeney.
“We’re known for the payouts on our instant tickets,” said Sweeney, “as far as the size of the prize and the total prize payout. The consumers know that.”
Lottery revenue is redistributed to cities with no strings attached, Sweeney said.
“To the lottery’s credit, they’re always putting out different tickets and new promotions,” said Calvani. “They have a good sense of what the players want.”
Guthrie Scrimgeour can be reached at [email protected].