is that what the data says is happening over there though? genuinely curious bc i worked at a convenience store (in the U.S.) for a while and people would routinely come in and dump their entire paychecks on scratch-offs. and then usually they’d spend their winnings on more.
yeah I mean, if that’s all it is, obviously its a relatively trivial issue. But when you extrapolate that to almost half of the population you are still exploiting people for a huge amount of profit (see elsewhere in the thread about the misleading ways it’s sold as being for funding services or charities when often they receive no additional funds), acting as a regressive tax, and some percentage (at least like 3%) of those people are going to develop a serious gambling problem, and having gambling be widely available and normalized makes it much much harder for those people to stop.
But I believe its more heavily regulated in the UK so it may not be nearly as bad as the new wild west situation in the US.
40%+ of people gambling on scratchoffs or the lottery is also quite bad tbh
I don’t know about the societal effects but you might want to consider if it’s just normalized, not actually better
I really don’t think spending a quid once a week on a scratchcard is much of an issue though.
is that what the data says is happening over there though? genuinely curious bc i worked at a convenience store (in the U.S.) for a while and people would routinely come in and dump their entire paychecks on scratch-offs. and then usually they’d spend their winnings on more.
yeah I mean, if that’s all it is, obviously its a relatively trivial issue. But when you extrapolate that to almost half of the population you are still exploiting people for a huge amount of profit (see elsewhere in the thread about the misleading ways it’s sold as being for funding services or charities when often they receive no additional funds), acting as a regressive tax, and some percentage (at least like 3%) of those people are going to develop a serious gambling problem, and having gambling be widely available and normalized makes it much much harder for those people to stop.
But I believe its more heavily regulated in the UK so it may not be nearly as bad as the new wild west situation in the US.