Boledo, The Lottery in San Pedro

The Lottery and Boledo always seems very popular in San Pedro.  Each Sunday morning, I drive past long lines at the Chinese food/Lottery places and wonder what is going on.  Time to buy my first ticket.

This is actually the first lottery ticket I’ve ever purchased here or elsewhere.  The “You need to be in it to win it” motto never really struck me.  I always figured your chance of finding a winning lottery ticket on the street was as good as buying one.  But two numbers only?  I could win this!  (I’m purposely ignoring my “Probability and Statistics” classes I took a long time ago.  One must do that to play the lottery).

Sunny’s Fast Food had four Chinese/Belizean employees lined up on the sidewalk with little computers and printers ready to take your money.  I tried to engage my salesperson in a conversation about the rules, but she looked at me like I was an alien…so I stepped aside and asked a patron.  (My saleswoman is the one not smiling closest in the picture).

Apparently for $1, you choose a 2 digit number (so 1 in 100 odds) and if your number is picked at 10am on Sunday morning, you win $70.  I picked my age and put $4 on it.  $280bzd here I come!

The winning numbers are posted on a chalk board.

As usual, I have a number of questions.  Why did I pay $4 but my receipt says $3.90?  Who runs this lottery?  In San Pedro, it is some company called Brad’s.  Is it privatized?  Do they pay some huge licensing fee?  Or is the lottery government owned?  Where do the revenues go?  Are we paying taxes on these tickets?  Who picks these numbers?  Where?  Do they just choose the numbers least picked?  I have more research to do.  But my sales lady at Sunny’s certainly was not going to provide me with the information.

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