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Comment by jimrandomh | Hacker News Reader

So, McDonalds bundled lottery tickets with all their products. The lottery structure was set up to deceive people who didn't think about it too hard, by making buyers collect sets in which one out of the set was orders of magnitude rarer than the others, but getting the common ones would make them feel like they had made progress. Then, for six years, every single one of the large prizes gets stolen by an employee.

Why are companies allowed to bundle lottery tickets with their products? It's no less of a tax on stupidity than the standalone lotteries are.

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Purchase is not required to play these games. You can walk into a McDonald's and ask for a game piece and they have to give you one.

That sounds like little more than a theoretical loophole. Almost no one will pay the time and fuel cost to go to a McDonald's if they aren't going to eat anything, and McDonald's knows this.

Trivially, there are tremendous numbers of people who, by dint of their normal day-to-day, need expend no effort to get to McDonalds. Have you other objections that can be addressed?

People are buying the food. The "lottery ticket" you get is just a marketing gimmick, not an actual game of chance in exchange for money.

Assuming they have to walk anywhere. People have tried rigging games like this by sending thousands of letters to the address to request entry.

You have to send off a handwritten letter with a SASE, actually: http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2012/10/16/mcdonalds-monopoly-...

So for the cost of two stamps, you could buy a Hashbrown and give the food to a hobo.

Nope you have to send a self addressed stamped envelope to get one. You can't just stroll by a McDonalds for them.

Source: My siblings and I sent in about 60 self addressed stamped envelopes between us one year a long time ago. We won a lot of Egg McMuffins and not much else.

I'm sure that's technically true, but I don't think all members of staff know all the rules like this. More likely is that they've been taught "customers get a piece when they buy something".

If this is the game I remember the pieces were attached to drink cups and fry containers, so staff wouldn't have to consciously think about handing out pieces at all.

IIRC correctly, McDonalds did have "loose" game pieces that were given out on request. This was the early 90's in SoCal.

I doubt any players didn't know that there were a few rare winning pieces, it's pretty clear when you've got 5 Park Places that it's the Boardwalk piece that's the rare one. I realized this even as a teen (back when I still ate at McD's regularly).

Though having an employee steal the winning prize does make the game much less fair.

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