What do you think of when we talk about selling tickets for your local state lottery selling its tickets online? No doubt you have some kind of an opinion on the topic. It probably has a lot of do with your general thoughts about gambling, or maybe your ideas about how secure shopping online can ever really be. The odds are that when you get to thinking about it you did not even give layoffs much of a thought.

Well, you would if you were someone like Joe Rossi, the head of 7-Eleven Franchise Owners Association of Chicagoland, who in an article for cspnet estimated that about 30 percent of his profits are coming from lottery ticket sales. Those people who make a profit from the lottery sales probably draw a very direct connection between those two things.

In a statement made by the collective owners of 7-Eleven stores in the state of Illinois the idea of online lottery sales in that state would lead to some pretty massive layoffs. How massive? Well, if you believe that numbers that they are releasing if the lottery sales go online then they are expecting to let go of about 7,000 workers in order to make up the losses to their stores. Of course, we do not know how the companies are getting this number. After all, they have not choice but to guess how much of their sales will be diverted by the capability of buying lottery tickets online. It is likely that these numbers have more to do with what would happen if all of the sales of lottery tickets were suddenly to go away.

At a press event Mr. Rossi told the public that the 7-Eleven stores in the Chicago area are not trying to prevent the sales of lottery tickets online, they simply want a cut of the action. The group is suggesting that the state require people who wish to buy lottery tickets online be forced to but a pre-paid card that must be filled up at a 7-Eleven stores.
From their point of view this will be good for the stores, who will still get their 5% cut of the sales, while still allowing the state to sell online. The stores would even get to keep the several dollars of sales that accompany the lottery ticket sales.  The only thing that they have not considered is that this system would not be more convenient to the consumer, who would still have to go to the store to get the card. Basically, the companies hope to preserve their revenue stream with this proposal.

Online ticket sales for the state lottery is going to begin in the month of April. Sales are now legal thanks to a legal opinion released by the U.S. Department of Justice last December.

If all goes according to plan than the state, which will only be selling tickets to its own residents of the legal age, stands to gain about $150 million of extra revenue each year.