Nearly three years ago the Arkansas Lottery purchased 100 lottery ticket vending machines.
At the time these machines were hailed as the future of the Arkansas Lottery–a way to provide more scholarships for college-bound students. We sent a Freedom of Information Act request to the Arkansas Lottery Commission this week asking how these machines have paid off. Here’s what we received:
| Fiscal Year | Gross Revenue |
| 2011 | $393,178.50 |
| 2012 | 4,740,968.50 |
| 2013 | 2,625,712.00 |
| Total | $7,759,859.00 |
Since 2010, nearly $7.8 million of the lottery’s revenue have come from lottery ticket vending machines. According to the lottery’s website, there are currently 76 vending machines distributed around the state.
$7.8 million may sound like a lot of money, but that number comes over the course of 3 years; compared to the lottery’s annual gross revenue–which tops out at close to half-a-billion dollars–this isn’t a whole lot of money.
Here’s how this relates to scholarships: Historically, the Arkansas Lottery has allocated between 20% and 22% of its gross revenue for scholarships. That means at best somewhere between $1.5 and $1.6 million of this vending machine money went to scholarships.
Between Fiscal Years 2011 and 2012, however, that amounts to less than 1% of the Arkansas Lottery’s scholarship allocations.
According to reports on the lottery’s website, the Arkansas Lottery transferred a total of about $171.8 million to the Department of Higher Education for scholarships during Fiscal Years 2011 and 2012. Using the figures above, we can calculate that about $1 million of that would have come from lottery ticket vending machines. So altogether, lottery ticket vending machines accounted for right around 0.64% of scholarship revenue between 2011 and 2012.
Now, those numbers could improve in the future. Last year vending machines contributed an estimated total of 1.05% of the lottery’s scholarship money. At the end of the day, however, we just aren’t talking about a significant amount.
When the Arkansas Lottery bought these machines back in 2010, we discussed the fuzzy math they did counting the machines’ costs. They spent approximately $1,650,000 on the machines, out of pocket, but signed a payment-plan establishing the total cost over the coming years at $5,000,000. They promised these machines would contribute to our “world class” lottery. Like we’ve said all along, there’s very little “world class” about it.
Like the lottery games themselves, these vending machines are a lot of smoke and mirrors with very little benefit.
