Amid sluggish sales, officials hope to beef up the number of outlets

Griswold's Family Produce sells honeydew and dreams.

The combination produce stand and old country store south of Monroe sells apples to zucchini, homemade ice cream and, now, N.C. lottery tickets. Pick up a bag of golden delicious and a chance to become a millionaire.

Griswold's is one of the newest, and less typical, retail outlets for Powerball or scratch-and-win tickets. It's also the sort of high-traffic, well-located outlet that lottery officials are seeking in a new push to sign up more ticket sellers who can help boost sluggish sales.

North Carolina had 1 lottery retailer for about every 1,500 residents at the end of June, proportionally fewer outlets than most neighboring states and fewer than the average for North American lotteries.

The average among U.S. and Canadian lotteries was about one outlet for every 1,300 people, and across the state line, there was one retailer for every 1,200 South Carolinians, according to the North American Association of State and Provincial Lotteries.

Also, the N.C. lottery's base of retailers has dipped in recent months. The game started with about 5,000 locations, peaked at about 5,900 and now has some 5,750, according to lottery officials.

Lottery leaders launched a recruitment drive in September, redirecting their sales staff to focus more on bringing additional retailers into the game's network.

Tom Shaheen, the lottery's executive director, wants to expand to 6,200 retailers by next summer.

"It's something you have to grow," Shaheen said, adding that the N.C. game is young compared to neighboring states. "I'm comfortable where we are at this moment. Would I be comfortable (with the same numbers) down the road? No."

The need for more retailers helps explain the overall sales difficulties the lottery is enduring. Instant, or scratch-and-win, ticket sales have declined, although they generally drive the growth in lotteries nationally.

The lottery raised $313 million for education in the fiscal year that ended June 30, compared to the $425 million that the General Assembly budgeted. Shaheen warned early on, though, that the legislature's figure was too high.

Recruiting more retailers

Twenty months after the lottery's launch, lottery executives say the retailers who signed up at the beginning have grown comfortable with the system and require less attention from the lottery's sales representatives. That frees up the sales staff to find new outlets."The first year and a half, our focus was on our base (of retailers)," said Barry Shead, the lottery's director of field sales, working in the Charlotte area last week. "We had to train our retailers, teach them how to sell this stuff. (Now) we have to move more into really recruiting more retailers."

The retailer roundup follows more than a year of overall decline in lottery sales, mostly among scratch tickets, which account for a majority of sales. Lottery executives are pumping more prize money into the scratch games to help rub away the reputation the lottery has gained for selling fewer winning tickets than its neighbors.

Boosting the number of lottery outlets could only help, but the growth isn't obvious yet. The 161 new retailers recruited between July 1 and mid-November works out to slightly fewer per month than the 227 who came on board during the first half of the year.

The lottery team didn't recruit retailers during the game's start-up. They had their hands full with the applications that poured in. Some of those outlets have since bailed out, while new ones have signed up.