MORRILTON — The owner of a tobacco shop that sells lottery tickets has won more than 350 prizes, including 25 flat-panel TV sets, through the Arkansas lottery’s Points for Prizes program in 2 1/2 years.
That’s twice what any of the other top winners have collected through the program, which is intended to reward and maintain lottery players.
Rhonda Sue Bryant owns Tobacco Corner Plus. Her wide-ranging haul includes binoculars, alarm clocks, an electric guitar, printers, vacuums, watches, pillows. She accumulated more than 3.5 million program points and cashed in most of them.
The TVs she has won include three Sharp 32-inch sets, three Coby 32-inchers, eight Sharp 26-inchers, 10 Panasonic 22-inchers and one Samsung 22-incher, lottery records say.
“Some people may look at my points and say, ‘Well, she takes advantage of it,’” Bryant said last week in an interview at her store a few miles off Interstate 40. “But then if they come and look and see what I do with it, I think they would have a different opinion. ... I don’t have any bad motives.”
Bryant said she has distributed most of the prizes to Sacred Heart Catholic School, Morrilton High School, Conway County Center for Exceptional Chil-dren Inc., Morrilton Christian Center and other such groups. Her other prizes went to lottery players through drawings at her store, which has sold the third-largest amount of lottery tickets among the state’s nearly 1,900 lottery retailers.
She said she has kept fewer than a dozen prizes. The one TV she kept is in a trailer used by people from her church, such as missionaries. She gave half of the TVs to charitable groups and the other half to lottery players through the store drawings.
Under the Points for Prizes program, anyone can register and create an account through the lottery website, myarkansaslottery.com. Participants earn points by entering numbers from eligible nonwinning scratch-off tickets, and winning and nonwinning tickets from draw games such as Powerball.
The points awarded for each ticket entered vary depending on their cost. The $1 scratch-off tickets earn 1 to 10 points, and purchases of $100 and more in draw game tickets earn 100 to 1,000 points, spokesman Julie Baldridge said.
Bryant said she spends at least an hour a day entering numbers from tickets into the website. The tickets were discarded by lottery players into a cardboard box at the store. People are allowed to take tickets from the discards. People also stop by to drop off their discards.
“The more we donate, the more people bring in tickets,” Bryant said. “We have always donated. Way before Points for Prizes came along, I would always donate to everybody that asked for a silent auction. It would be just an Avon gift basket. Now I can donate bigger prizes.”
Nearly 255,000 people have registered for the program, and 76.5 million of the 280.8 million eligible tickets have beenentered into the program, according to figures provided by Gaming Director Mike Smith. The players have booked 1.273 billion points and redeemed 843 million of them for 106,428 items of merchandise valued at $12.6 million.
According to the website, players can obtain such things as a 42-inch flat-panel television for 82,500 points, a 15.6-inch notebook computer bundle for 80,300 points and Antwerp diamond earrings for 75,200 points.
Bryant said she started entering nonwinning tickets into an earlier lottery game, Play-It-Again, soon after the lottery started on Sept. 28, 2009, “but it was just to win” money.
“But when they started [Points for Prizes], it just snowballed,” she said. She was shocked, she said, that the lottery let lottery retailers participate in the program, but “we buy tickets just like anybody else does.”
The Points for Prizes program started in January 2010, and the online store to redeem the points opened on Feb. 8, 2010, Baldridge said.
The lottery has paid Georgia-based scratch-off ticket vendor Scientific Games International $11.5 million for merchandise through the Points for Prizes program as part of their contract for which total payments of $37 million have been made to the firm for the past three years. Points for Prizes is part of a contract amendment that former lottery Director Ernie Passailaigue unilaterally implemented in August 2009.
Arkansas is the first lottery to have the Points for Prizes program, according to Scientific Games. Baldridge said Iowa and Tennessee have similar programs, and lotteries in Missouri and North Carolina are scheduled to start their programs between July and October.
A number of states have some type of reward program, often in-house, and some are more like Arkansas’, she said.
Baldridge points to the more than 250,000 participants in the Arkansas program and the lottery’s annual ticket sales of nearly $500 million as evidence that the program has worked. The lottery has raised $265.4 million for college scholarships on ticket sales of $1.286 billion, she said.
The Tobacco Corner Plus store in Morrilton has sold $3.182 million in lottery tickets, trailing only G&B Liquor’s $5.3 million in Stuttgart and Y&E Superstop’s $3.5 million in Bryant among the retailers, according to Baldridge.
Why has the Tobacco Corner Plus sold the third-largest amount of lottery tickets?
“My personal opinion is because God takes care of me,” Bryant said. “People don’t associate God with the lottery and when I tell people that they think I am nuts.
“But we tithe off everything we make, and God is always going to take care of me whether I am selling lottery or selling shoes on the corner. I know people don’t like to hear that, God and lottery together. But he just blesses me,” Bryant said.
Bryant is not the only player with a retailer connection to be among the Points for Prizes points leaders. Rebecca Kirby, owner of the Tobacco Town store in Russellville, has accumulated the secondlargest number, more than 2.3 million. She’s won more than 140 prizes, including 25 TVs, according to lottery records.
“It’s for our customers and employees,” Kirby explained in a telephone interview. She said she hasn’t kept any of the TVs.
She said her store has a trash bin for players to put their losing tickets in, and she conducts prize drawings for players with losing tickets. “It’s quite a bit of time to enter the tickets into the website,” she said.
Callie Griffith of Arkadelphia has accumulated more than 1.8 million points and won more than 90 prizes, including 27 TV sets. She is former co-manager of the Phillips Superstop store in Arkadelphia and left the store in February after eight years there, she said.
Her customers gave her losing lottery tickets for her to enter into Points for Prizes, and her workers and friends gave her some losing tickets, too, she said.
“I didn’t do it just for myself,” Griffith said. “It was mostly giving away to other people. I have a heart to give back.”
Mary Jones of Colt, manager of the Shell gas station in Forrest City, has accumulated more than 1.2 million points and won more than 70 prizes, including eight TVs.
Jones said she uses the prizes for Christmas gifts, gifts to employees and to people who give her their tickets.
“You get really neat gifts,but it takes a whole lot of points to get them,” she said.
But some people who’ve accumulated many points are reluctant to talk about them.
Robert Toll of Mabelvale, who accumulated more than 1.5 million points and collected more than 100 prizes, and Rosie Hunt of Little Rock, who accumulated more than 1.2 million points and collected more than 100 prizes, said last week that they don’t want to speak publicly about these matters.
Asked whether the fact that it’s retailers who have accumulated the most points in the program is an indication of a problem, Baldridge replied, “We welcome all players, and retailers are players, too.”
She pointed out that Bryant has used the program to boost her business to become the third-ranked lottery retailer in the state while helping local schools.
Baldridge said the program “is having a positive effect on lottery sales, and we look forward to more and more players joining in as they realize there are multiple ways to win the lottery.”
But, she said, lottery officials decided during the past week or so to limit people to entering 200 tickets a week starting sometime next month.
Baldridge said lottery officials had considered this option for several months, even before they learned that lottery retailers were the ones accumulating the most points in the program.
“We are trying to give more people a chance to win,” Baldridge said. “It’s not that we think that anything that has gone on so far is unfair or improper, but we think this will be a better method.”
Bryant said she doesn’t have a problem with the limit. “It’s their lottery and their rules. It will just cut down on the stuff we give away,” she said.
Jones said imposing a 200-a-week limit on the number of tickets that a player can enter “sounds kind of dumb to me.”
Front Section, Pages 1 on 06/24/2012