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WELLFLEET — Andrew Earl’s dream is to open a gym and restaurant named after his mother in his hometown of Birmingham, Ala. Outside the Cumberland Farms gas station in Wellfleet, Earl said that winning the Massachusetts lottery could finance that dream, which is why he buys scratch tickets here almost every day.
So far, Earl said, he’s won prizes of $1,000, $500, and $250. “That’s what keeps you going,” he said with a smile. “It’s addictive.”
Earl is one of many daily lottery players on the Outer Cape. In visits to five convenience stores here that sell tickets, every clerk reported that the state lottery was a top seller and that they knew their regular bettors’ habits, including their game preferences and play schedule.
“I definitely think people are addicted,” said Shauna Smith, who works at the Wellfleet Mobil station. Smith said the only product that outsells lottery tickets is cigarettes.
“We don’t have enough hands to sell that thing,” said Angella Weddas, the manager at Cumberland Farms in Wellfleet. She estimates that 150 to 300 people come in every day to buy lottery tickets. “When people win at the stores, they think it’s a lucky store,” she said.
But even when someone does get supremely lucky, it doesn’t mean they stop playing. Barbara, who lives in Eastham but declined to give her last name, said that she purchased a $1 million ticket at the Cumberland Farms in Orleans two years ago. On Saturday, she was there to buy a $20 scratch-off but acknowledged that her cosmic luck may have worn off. “I just like to gamble, I guess,” she said.
State-Owned Gambling
The Mass. state lottery is the most successful in the world, according to Marlene Warner, CEO of the Mass. Council on Gambling and Health. Mass. residents spent more per capita on the lottery than in any other state — an average of $1,037 per year per adult, according to GBH’s 2025 podcast series on the state lottery called “Scratch & Win.”
State taxes on gambling — including levies on the lottery, casinos, and sports betting — are the fourth largest source of state revenue, bringing in $1.5 billion in fiscal 2025. The state lottery accounts for 68 percent of that, according to Phineas Baxandall, director of policy and research at the nonprofit Mass. Budget and Policy Center and the author of a recent report on the subject.
That report also points out that problem gambling disproportionally affects lower-income and nonwhite players.
Nonetheless, the state is moving to further deregulate gambling and expand the state’s lotteries.
In 2022, the state legalized online sports betting. In February 2024, the state lottery started selling $50 scratch-off tickets.
The 2025 state budget authorized the creation of the iLottery, which will allow users to place bets on scratch tickets, Powerball, and other lotteries from their phones, according to Baxandall’s report. The iLottery is set to launch next summer.
Warner said the iLottery is meant to attract younger players and will be especially effective in places with fewer brick-and-mortar stores. It could “dramatically change the number of people gambling on the Cape and Islands,” she said.
The state’s lottery includes three main types of games: scratch-off tickets, Keno games where users pick their own set of lucky numbers and hope for matches from state draws, and low-odds, high-payout “lotto” games like Powerball or Mega Millions.
When the multi-state Powerball jackpot reached $1 billion in late August, Weddas said, there were crowds in her store and she nearly sold out of tickets.
The less-flashy scratch-off tickets generate by far the most sales of any lottery game — nearly $4 billion in 2024, according to state data.
Regular lottery play is also “the greatest predictor of someone having some type of gambling problem,” said Warner.
Lottery critics say that “gambling problems” are a deliberate outcome of the state’s choices.
“We have a system of taxation by exploitation, and the Massachusetts lottery is exhibit A in that system,” said Les Bernal, the national director of Stop Predatory Gambling, a nonprofit advocacy group based in Lawrence.
The state’s lottery is “unique in just how exploitative and manipulative it is — it’s one of the most extreme lotteries in the country,” said Bernal. “There’s a glaring contradiction between our creed and our practice when it comes to predatory gambling.”
Bernal estimates that Mass. residents will lose $15 billion in personal wealth to legalized sports gambling, casinos, and state lotteries over the next five years.
“It’s just a sterile transfer of wealth from thousands and thousands of people’s pockets into the pockets of some very wealthy people who run the games,” Bernal said.
In a statement to the Independent, Mass. Lottery spokesperson Rachel Guerra wrote: “For more than 50 years, the Lottery has operated in a regulated, transparent, and responsible manner, providing a source of entertainment for those of legal age who choose to play our games.”
Guerra also said that lottery revenues create a funding stream of unrestricted aid to the state’s 351 cities and towns and provide a revenue stream for local businesses.
Local Aid
The Outer Cape towns spend less on the lottery than the state average and have fewer lottery vendors, according to state data. The towns also receive less local aid from lottery revenue per capita than the state average.
Provincetown residents spent nearly $5 million on the lottery in 2024, according to state lottery reports, but the town received only $170,319 in Unrestricted General Government Aid in 2025, which is the avenue by which lottery profits are returned to municipalities.
That distribution is not a simple share of total sales in each town but instead is disbursed according to a “mildly economically progressive” formula, according to Baxandall’s report, in which low-income or low-property-wealth communities are more likely to receive aid. The role of property values in that formula means Outer Cape towns benefit less.
Because of the formula, Provincetown received 3 cents back for every $1 in lottery sales in fiscal 2023, according to figures reported by the Boston Globe in January.
Wellfleet received 5 cents per dollar, while Eastham received 4 cents. Truro, which has only one lottery vendor and the lowest lottery sales of the Outer Cape towns, received 49 cents back per $1 of lottery sales in the town, for a total of $34,851 in local aid.
New revenue from the phone-based iLottery will not go back to municipalities in the same way, Baxandall said. Instead, the money will support grant programs for early education.
Funding government programs through gambling receipts is “not my favorite policy,” said state Sen. Julian Cyr, but “it’s been a longstanding part of how we built our budget. This is something we’ve inherited.
“There is not much conversation about reform of the lottery” in the legislature right now, Cyr added. Instead, “there’s been a consistent push by the House to expand gaming.”
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Filed Under: Economy, Featured, Local Journalism Project, News, Next Generation, Towns, Wellfleet
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