Lottery Day!

Lottery day! Lottery day! I have been looking forward to this for two months.

I am not normally a lottery player, but in Taiwan you have to be a fool not to play. You see, every time you buy something from a store you get a receipt with a lottery number printed across the top. On the 26th of every odd month the newspapers print the winning numbers. The prizes awarded range from NT$200 ($6.25 CDN) to NT$2 million ($62,500 CDN). To get the grand prize, you have to match all eight numbers of the grand prize number. To win other amounts, you have to match at least the last three numbers of the winning numbers. There are three sets of winning numbers, plus the grand prize number. And yes, foreigners can win!

From what I can piece together from blogs and old newspaper articles, the Taiwanese government started this lottery sometime around 1999. Apparently a lot of businesses were making sales under the table and not paying the proper amount of tax, so the government figured if millions of dollars were up for grabs, people would demand their receipts. All stores, excluding street vendors, had to switch over to special cash registers that printed government issued receipts with randomized lottery numbers.

It seems to be working. Sales clerks are always forcing the receipt on you. I was feeling bogged down with paper in my first couple of weeks here with all the receipts being forced into my hand with the change. You definitely get strange looks when you refuse a receipt or throw out a fistful of them at 7-Eleven. If you are a lottery player-hater, you can toss your receipts in a charity box. Some charities have made tens of millions from donated receipts over the years.

I have over 200 receipts saved up. Unfortunately, most of them are for the January/February draw. This lottery is for November/December. But I still have about 80 chances to become disappointed.