What a perfect combination, losing at the casinos and securing a payday loan to cover another payday loan in order to buy groceries!
The practitioner of this financial schedule is a man I’ve known for about 30 years. His wife I’ve known for less time, and each one sat with me for a couple of hours, on different days, to justify why they feel that way. I state emphatically that I am neither their financial adviser nor confessor. They simply wanted someone to listen, not give advice.
But we’ll get to the gambler and his spouse in a few paragraphs. Let’s start with some observations regarding games of chance.
When I worked in the Midwest, several supermarkets (they’re usually called tea companies: Jewel Tea, A and P Tea Company, etc.) ran promotions to give a single letter in the word “CASH” with each purchase. Whoever was able to spell the entire word would win a sum of $1000, a whopping figure in those days, the mid 1960s.
It seems that everyone in town made frequent trips to the stores, hoping to get the right combination. Trouble was, everybody who participated was able to spell “ASH,” as the “C” was missing.
At the paper I worked for, we considered writing a story on the phenomenon. We’d gotten letters and phone calls, some of them complaining of the deception: only a limited number of “C’s,” and only a handful would claim the prize. Yet, the classified section of the Naperville Sun was busy running ads in which people offered to pay up to $200 to anyone who would provide the “C.” Well, duh!
Has anything changed?
We’ve been through the days of Ed McMahon’s offer to make all of us zillionaires. Publishers found dozens of ways to make things tempting. Though our chances of winning 20 mill didn’t depend on how many magazines we ordered, the wording was such that to the average person, the thinking was, “I’ve gotta buy a bunch of mags to improve my chances.”
One particularly creative semantic trick was to show only the words, “Art Trujillo is a $10,000,000 winner!” Good, I’ll be extra generous at church next Sunday. But on opening the envelope, we see the previously hidden words, “We hope to announce that . . .” So when we put them all together, the offer isn’t as tempting.
Years later, I stopped at a local fast-food outlet, where customers received a scratch card with each purchase. Many people broke their orders down into several parts: “I’ll have an ice cream cone. Here’s the money. Where’s my card? Now, I think I’ll have fries. Gimme my card.”
One elderly gentleman called me aside to show how close he had come to winning a hundred bucks. He needed to scratch off each square on the card and come up with three matches. All of his cards featured only double matches. But he kept playing because he was oh so-oo close.
As for the casino-trekking buddy, one can only say that the odds of losing are great. How else can casinos make such claims of the megabucks they take in? The lottery, which in my very limited observation, is supported mainly by people who can’t afford it, justifies its existence by pointing out the millions that have gone toward scholarships.
The lengthy conversations I had with husband and wife yielded this information:
He said: “My wife got a job just the other day, so I felt lucky.” His monthly check is for only twice the amount he lost at the casino. He also explained, “I needed to take out a payday loan to cover the first one.”
Soon, I hope, he’ll learn that the ease in which payday loans can be secured costs the borrower in other ways. Sometimes, a piddling $100 loan can double.
She said: “I got this job and asked for the money to be deposited directly into my checking account. I’m furious that the chance we had to get ahead is no longer there because my husband lost the money.”
Both of them are adamant about their position. Maybe I’d be more optimistic regarding both their financial future and their marriage if somehow the husband had been one of the rare ones to win big. But he didn’t.
As one who’s never been bitten by the gambling bug, I can pontificate on the existence of people happy to take your money, and an army of people just as eager to part with it.
But as sure as I am that there are few winners, there are many people who would disagree.
Yeah, yeah, I’ve heard it many times before: “Nobody’s forcing them to gamble, and besides it’s their business.”