The store owner must not have had any controls in place to keep track of his Lottery Tickets. One store I shop in keeps track of the serial numbers of the tickets (logs the next ticket to be sold in each roll: at the start of business and at the end of busness) then checks the days receipts against the number of tickets sold. The book of tickets has to be activated before being put out for sale. The inventory of tickets not yet put out for sale/activated are kept under lock and key which few people have access to.

Yes,  the books are inventory.  However, when this happened lottery was new to TN.  Our store is on the AL/TN stateline so we were processing a lot of tickets.   We were instructed to activate the books and keep them moving.  The owner did not have a balance/check system set up to know if tickets were sold or taken.  She knew through the lottery account something wasn't adding up.

This went on for nearly a year.  I am not sure but she may have called around to different retailers in the area and few beyond and alerting to check for serial numbers of some books. 

The system she uses is better now.  Lots of paper work on her part.

That's how it is set up now.

If they were doing a really good job of tracking inventory they'd know when a piece of Bazooka bubble gum was missing, even if they couldn't determine what happened to it. Plenty of businesses deal with inventory that's much harder to account for.  In addition, plenty of people run reasonably successful businesses without managing them nearly as well as possible, and accounting and inventory control are often weak areas.

A long time ago I worked in a business with old  mechanical cash registers. The registers had two settings for totaling sales at the end of the day. One kept a running total, so that each day's total was the sum of all previous days' totals and the current day's total. The other setting reset the register to start from zero. The owners were largely clueless, and the cashout procedure was to reset the totals at the end of each day, which meant that they had no real record of what was rung up during the day, since it was possible to reset the total at any point. Through a stroke of luck (mostly just a fortunate accident) they discovered that an employee who worked evenings sometimes reset the register after  making a sale, but they never knew how much had been taken. 

That we see a lot of stories about workers stealing huge numbers of tickets over a period of time suggest that a lot of stores don't do a very good job of tracking their ticket inventory. Of course it's also possible that with a few people using the same register a lot of it is buried in cash drawers that come up short on a regular basis. God knows that nowadays most clerks can't count change if the register doesn't tell them how much it is.

KY Floyd writes: " God knows that nowadays most clerks can't count change if the register doesn't tell them how much it is. "

Gee, I wonder what it's like to go through life feeling superior to the rest of the world.  I'm not saying you're totally wrong, but sometimes people are very judgmental when they're being helped in a store.  I'm well educated and I've budgeted millions for a corporation, but I'm sure it's much different when someone works in a noisy environment with lots of chatter and distractions helping one customer after another at a fast pace. 

When I read this story, my first reaction was "Well at least that tells me now that  there really are large winning payoffs in the scratchers.  I was always sceptical of them but now i know- well except for the clerks that keep a running count on the loosers.  But  I'd rather have the clerkskeep a running count than to have someone win from stealing tickets and never get caught.  Good for them, teach them a lesson,  one that they should have know already.

You either know how to count back the change or you don't.

Those that know how doesn't need the machine to tell them what to return..

Those that don't will slow a line down staring as if they were a deer in the road.

Tntea, 

I dont mean to sound like i'm superior either  but you're right.  I go to places and think " how did you get this job?   And don't try to give the clerk $5.01 if the bill is $2.26, they'll be screaming for the manager. Sure there are things I cant do,  but the basics? come on.  But they can count those lottery tickets losers and will definately know when to purchase (or steal) the winners that's for sure.

Jailem!!!!    

Although I worked for a corporation handling millions, when I moved here I got into retail.  So regarding the $5.01, as good as I am in math, I still might use a small calculator.  No matter where I've worked I always had a couple of cheap calculators even if I had to buy one.  Usually it was because I wrote out an invoice with multiple items and had to add tax, but still, it only takes about 10 seconds to enter $5.01 minus $2.26 = $2.75.  When you are working with money all day long and running around a store from room to room, answering phones, placing orders, handling returns, customer complaints, etc., it is more important to be quick & efficient than to worry about looking like a math genius. Maybe you are talking about being in a store where the people are just standing behind a counter chewing gum, but sometimes there's a lot of multi-tasking.  Tntea has more experience in convenience stores, since I rarely dealt with cash, but I try not to judge.  However, more than once when I was setting up a delivery, a client spelled "street" or "lane" for me because I couldn't hear and asked him/her to repeat his address. I'm sure that person went home, got on an internet board and told everyone about a dumb blond at a store who couldn't spell. 

umm i got a question. where does it say in the article how they was finally caught?? i seemed to have missed it. i am not

saying that they are right for stealing the tickets,but the owner has to take some of the blame for allowing this kind

of theft to go on right under his or her nose for 3 years. unless the woman that was stealing was also in charge of the

lottery ticket inventory. i really would like to know more about this story because there just isnt enough information

here.