posted
Competitions. They're big news just now. There's a huge fuss about those TV phone-in scams, but I don't really get what the big problem is.
Say there's a 10,000 pound prize. There's only the one prize, and only one person can win it. Meanwhile, 20,000 people phone up at a quid a time to enter. The company makes 10 grand on the deal. Easy money, but no one seems to have a problem with that in itself.
The problem is that, of the 20,000 people, only 15,000 were ever entered into the draw. But only one person could win it anyway, so all that's been taken away is the chance to win. If they had been entered into the draw then they would've been happy, even though they'd have lost the same amount of money and the same amount of people would've phoned up so the same profit would've been made. You have to be in it to win it, and that's enough to satisfy people even if they frankly don't stand a chance.
So, who's monitoring this competition? This time it costs sixty quid to enter, giving you a 1-in-25,000 chance of winning a 650,000 pound house. Someone will win, which is lovely, and the owners will make off with 1.5 million. Nice! Everyone should sell their house like that. Except that you'd soon run out of people with 60 quid to spare. It's incredible that they've found that many to buy in this time.
And there comes the question with these things. I wonder how much people would be willing to pay out on a regular basis to be in with a quite good chance. Say you had a 5,000 pound car and you offered 5,000 tickets at 2 quid each. That's way better odds of winning than the stupid National Lottery. Would people regularly buy in to this, or do they have to have the chance of winning something huge to make it "worth their while", even if the odds of winning the huge pot are astronomically poor. 5,000-to-1 would still be too poor for people to regularly buy tickets to win a stupid 5,000 pound car. They want 8 million, and nothing less.
Are you into competitions, or the lottery? Do you sometimes enter a random competition in a magazine because you really, really fancy the prize, even if the chances of you actually winning are pathetic?
Possible Fortune
I buy a lottery ticket about once every couple of months, possibly less. I do it so I can wonder round daydreaming for a couple of hours. I reckon a quid is actually worth that feeling, insane as that seems. It's very, very rare that I even get one single number in the draw. Once in all those years I got three numbers and claimed a tenner. Basically, I'm only buying the tickets for the feeling that I could win. If someone told me that I'd been buying lottery tickets for the last six months but my numbers hadn't actually been entered in the draw I don't think I could actually give a toss. But I would want to know that next week they were definitely being entered. But at least the lottery fund goes to the odd good cause here and there. The GMTV fund just went to GMTV and the phone company. Which is a horrible thought.
I also entered a text message entry competition in a magazine last month. Completely futile. It was for a really tasty looking home cinema system though, and it's very unlikely that I'm ever going to spend real money on something like that, so what the hell.
That's what these companies leech onto. Dreams. They are dreamsuckers. But they do inject a lovely chemical which means the wound doesn't hurt at all.
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