Life

Call Me the Big Winner!

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Last Updated on August 28, 2023

The grocery store chain Food Lion, along with the other chains in the Hannaford family, is running The Great Grocery Giveaway contest, which involves shoppers receiving scratch-off cards for purchases they make in the store.

I’m not exactly sure how they determine how many scratch-off cards you’re supposed to get based on any specific dollar amount, because every time I shop there, though my tally is normally in the same general area, I’ve sometimes received two cards at once and sometimes received five.

For the most part, they had been stacking up on my counter, and tonight I counted 23 in the growing stack. So I figured I’d go ahead and start scratching to see if I might be a winner. I wasn’t expecting to be.

But it turns out that I was:  

I won a buck.

A whole dollar!

After I’d scratched off all of the tickets, I noticed there was a “second chance” game at the store’s website, in which you can enter a code number at the bottom of the card to see if you’re a winner. I entered those 22 codes and again got nothing.

Talk about duds!

On the cards themselves, there is a pyramid of nine gold circles with dollar signs on them. The object of the game is to scratch off any three of those circles. If you reveal the same icon and three-digit number each time, you win the amount revealed when you scratch off the “prize box.” This means that each card, potentially, could be played for a different amount of money, but that no matter how much the card is worth, you still have to reveal just the right three numbers to actually win.

In my case, every one of the cards was worth one dollar. You’d think I might hit a $5 or $10 card in there somewhere. But the most I could possibly have won each time was a buck. On the other hand, just for fun, I scratched off all nine circles on a few of the cards, an act that, naturally, voids the card: in all cases, there are three matches, so it’s possible that every card literally is a potential winner.

I guess that explains why there are so many $1 cards.

What really surprised me, though, is when I went to the game’s official rules online. According to their rules, 20 of the cards have been printed with a $250,000 top prize at stake. But the “estimated number of winners” they list for that top prize is “zero,” with an additional notation that there is only a 24% chance that one winner would emerge from those 20.

With odds like that, I guess that’s why they can afford to print that many top prize cards to begin with.

the authorPatrick
Patrick is a Christian with more than 30 years experience in professional writing, producing and marketing. His professional background also includes social media, reporting for broadcast television and the web, directing, videography and photography. He enjoys getting to know people over coffee and spending time with his dog.

1 Comment

  • My sister-in-law let their 4 year old grandson scratch off the tickets and they won $10. Of course he wanted to buy all candy with the money.

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