Check Your Lotto Tickets

We gets tons of people in our store every day playing lottery. They range from customers that have never played before and want to try their luck on a $1 ticket to those that are obsessed and often spend $300 or more a day trying to hit the big one.

One thing I notice, with new and seasoned lottery players, is that sometimes they will hand me a lottery ticket and ask if I can run it through the machine to see if it's a winner.

I don't advise people to do this, unless you fully trust the cashier.

Why? Because it's so easy for me to say 'No, sorry, it's not a winner.' and hand it back to you. By then, I'll have run it through the machine to cash it, but am handing it back to you now unusable because I already cashed it in. If I ever did this to people, I'm sure many of them would not notice.

Also, always know what amount your ticket is for. I get even more people coming in thinking they won $1 when they actually won $10.

One time I had a customer playing tickets right in front of me. He ran up to me all excited because he won $200. I cashed his ticket and saw that it wasn't $200, it was $2,000. I could have easily taken the extra $1,800 and ran, because this guy was expecting just $200.

I always warn my customers that they should never walk into a store not knowing what they won. And that it's too easy for cashiers to lie.

Luckily for my customers they have a trusted cashier like moi.

Have you ever done this? Just handed your ticket to someone you don't even know and trusted them to tell you what you've won?