Thursday, April 07, 2005

A Culture of Chance

I met this morning with a couple other pastors and we were reflecting on our society and some of the directions it's heading.


What struck me at one point was how some gambling addicts are having difficulty with the Tim Horton's Roll Up The Rim To Win, contest our local coffee hole is running. For some of them who are living on the edge of their addiction, now going out for coffee isn't really safe. While it's not big time gambling, it can be enough to get your saliva running, and the adrenalin moving through your body again.


I have some friends who struggle with that particular vice. I need to be aware of how some things like this effect them.


In other gambling news, the local and only Burger King is now closed down. Seems that the owner went down to Vegas for a little holiday, and ended up loosing everything, including the store. Sigh.


We came up with a great title for a book or article, "The Culture of Chance."


Now somebody just has to write it.

3 comments:

  1. Burger King is closed?!



    Yeah, gambling. I used to spend a good portion of my allowance on hockey cards and, later, pinball. I enjoyed both, of course, but there was an underlying goal of "winning": getting so-and-so's rookie card (which will be worth money, but never sold), or winning free games (at one time I won at least 6, or was it 10, free games off of one game of pinball). It's not gambling in the conventional sense--at least there aren't huge sums of money being poured into it (it'd be interesting to know how much money I spent on each).



    My coffee buying has gone up significantly with ROTRTW. With each cup I think to myself, half-joking, half-seriously, "This is the one!" I've only won a donut and a cofee.



    So I have a very small understanding of the gambling mindset.

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  2. At 7-11 when I was working there, we had a customer that would come in and buy some crossword scratch tickets. Then she would go to the corner of the store and perfectly scratch out the squares in the crossword. She would spend a half hour on just one ticket. If she lost, she would buy another or if she won, she would redeem it for more scratch tickets. One day she stayed in the store for about 3 hours doing this. She only spent about $20-30 but it was sad nonetheless.

    On another note, a friend of mine won a $30,000 vehicle from a casino. Prior to this my brother and I warned them about how the odds are totally in the casino's favor. But even without that vehicle they have still won much more money than they spent at casinos.

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  3. Things have changed in the UK over the last 15 years. It's become a 'something for nothing' culture, where the expectation is that you should be able to 'win' all kinds of things for little or no outlay.



    The national lottery is an evil thing in the way that all the supporting advertising created this idea "it WILL be YOU" (the actual phrase was "it could be you"). Charity giving halved overnight too, as people spent money they'd have otherwise donated on lottery tickets.



    I watched this happen, helpless. I don't have a TV and without that, the newspaper ads were impotent. A whole nation changed it's attitude to gambling in less than 6 months.

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