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Lottery sales fast-paced in low-income, Latino and Asian neighborhoods
Three California Lottery Scratchers tickets, littered on the ground in Los Angeles.
(
Kevin Ferguson/KPCC
)
Listen
4:10
Lottery sales fast-paced in low-income, Latino and Asian neighborhoods
This is the second of a two-part series. The audio from the first part is available here.
A cluster of stores in Orange County, all in Westminster and Garden Grove, were among the lottery’s 30 biggest retailers in 2016 and 2017. The six stores — Gallop Liquor, Café Trang, Coffee Lovers, Al’s Market, LaunderLand and Café Deng — together sold $53.3 million in lottery tickets.
The retailers all sit in census tracts that are home to a plurality of Asian-Americans, and are among the bottom group of incomes in the county.
That trend echoes KPCC/LAist's analysis of two years of ticket sales data, which found that, across California:
- Ticket sales are disproportionately high in the poorest quarter of census tracts in nearly every populous county.
- Ticket sales are disproportionately high in Southern California census tracts with a plurality of Asian-Americans or Latinos.
- Ticket sales are disproportionately high in the Southern California counties of Los Angeles, Orange, Riverside, San Bernardino and Ventura.
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