We’ve just gotten our sales figures for March, and, holy buckets! We were officially BUSY last month!
Sales of lottery instant-scratch tickets in Iowa set an all-time monthly record in March, helped by the release of “Colossol Crossword,” the game with oversized, double-sided tickets that debuted March 5.
Scratch-game sales totaled nearly $24 million in March, an increase of more than $900,000 from our previous monthly sales record for those games that had been set a year earlier.
So what’s behind the numbers? We always concentrate on the mix of games that we have in the field, doing our best to keep different colors, ticket designs and price points out there so you’ll have choices. And we like to try new innovations, like double-sided tickets. A scratch game was the first product that the Iowa Lottery sold back when it started in 1985, and scratch tickets have traditionally been our leading sales category.
Part of the fun for us is investigating new ideas that we think will appeal to players, and then releasing the product to see if our predictions hold true.
The lottery’s top three months for scratch-ticket sales have all been in March, from 2016 to 2018:
March 2018: $23.96 million
March 2017: $23.04 million
March 2016: $22.75 million
We’ve theorized that maybe there’s a spring-fever phenomenon in there, too, that gets us all out and about more in March after a long winter. That could be reflected in our numbers!
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