If only we learned the lessons while we were young?

I received this article from last Monday's Newcastle Herald (NSW, Australia). It is an interesting article about how simple lessons if they had been learned in childhood, could teach us something about gambling as adults. It is reprinted in full here.

Newcastle Herald, Page 8 (Mon 8 Nov 2004)
Luck of life's a fortune
OPINION & ANALYSIS

DO you feel lucky?

My kids certainly do. None of them can walk past a lucky dip without wanting to have a go.

You know the sort of thing. There's a bucket or a bin outside a shop or at a weekend market, filled with enticing, brightly coloured packages in various shapes and sizes. Sometimes there's a pink bucket full of girly things and a blue bucket full of things for boys.

I have watched my kids spend their hard-won dollars and cents on these lucky dips quite a number of times over the years and I get the impression that they must be very unlucky children. How else can you explain the rubbish they always seem to get?

Once, when I was sick of hearing them whinge about the junk they just paid a dollar for, I gave them a sensible lecture on small-scale economics. Imagine you were a shopkeeper, I suggested. You are setting up a one-dollar lucky dip. You want to make a profit. Surely you will spend less than a dollar on the items to be wrapped and put in the bucket?

The kids struggled with this concept. There MUST be at least some decent things in the bucket, along with all the rubbish, they argued.

And they still believe this, despite the fact that none of them has ever actually shown me anything even half-decent that they've trawled from a lucky dip. Recently my youngest boy was almost in tears when I wouldn't let him spend $3 on a particularly shiny and exciting looking lucky dip. I tried to tell him the old proverb about a bird in the hand (his $3) being worth two in the bush (the wonderful treasure he imagined he might find in the lucky dip bin), but he didn't want to hear about it.

After much argument I relented, as much to teach him a lesson as anything else. He paid his money, dipped into the bucket, and after much feeling about took out a shiny little package.

He tore off the shiny paper, his eyes alight with excitement and anticipation. And found inside a garish little painted plastic skull on a cheap keyring.

Profoundly disappointed, Jerry was forced to admit he had wasted his money. We gave the skull back to the shopkeeper, who wrapped it up again in more shiny paper and put it back in the lucky dip.

She persuaded Jerry to have another dip, and this time she guided his hand to a package she considered was the best item in the bucket: it was a queer little toy bird on a stick.

We instantly presumed it must have been that much-mentioned "bird in the hand".

My wife reckons there must be some kind of consumer protection law under which you can demand your money back for dud lucky dip prizes. Go figure.

Presumably if that was the case you could just open everything in the bucket until you found something worth having. Personally I can't see it: I think you are buying a mystery and by paying your money you're agreeing to accept whatever lies beneath the wrapping paper, be it bad or worse.

And when it comes to that, are lucky dips really just a form of gambling? Like scratch lottery tickets where you pay your money knowing there's a faint outside chance you might win $10,000 but it's overwhelmingly probable that you'll actually get nothing.

And like poker machines too, all bright and shiny and full of mesmerising but mostly empty promises.

Surprisingly, for all their disappointing experiences my kids can't get over their lucky dip thing. Their heads always turn when they see those beguiling little parcels and I see their hands start twitching.

They start making mental pictures of the wondrous treasures that might be waiting for them at the bottom of that bucket. They can't help thinking that this time it might be different.

And all they have to do is hand over a dollar or two . . .

We're optimistic creatures, we humans.

We love to believe in the pot of gold at the end of the rainbow and most of us seem to cherish the idea, deep inside, that some blinding piece of good luck luck might be waiting around the next corner to transform our lives and make us truly happy.

And if not that corner, then the one after, or the one after that.

For many of us it's a forlorn hope, but I think in some ways that pathetic, exploited, shopworn but incredibly durable belief is one of the things I like best about the human race.

I think that there are lessons to be learned from an article like this. Gambling is attractive because we are humans. No matter how a gambling form is designed and how terrible the odds, someone will always take the risk. That is why when we design gambling options we need to reduce the potential for harm as much as possible. We need to inform potential players of the risks and what they can expect before, during and after the gambling experience, but this will always be only half the story. Wouldn't it have been better if the stallholder in the article had a board up showing people you could get one of these things just like those machines at the supermarket that have toys in them. It may not be worth the money you spend but at least you can make an informed choice.

Business do things to make money. Gambling operators are no different.

What do you think?

GG