This interview is brought to you by Abacus Lottery.

While the lottery remains a massive revenue stream for state governments and a meaningful traffic driver for convenience stores, it’s been facing a challenge at checkouts.

Around half of all U.S. adults report buying at least one lottery ticket per year, which amounted to $113 billion in sales last year, with 68% of that volume going through retail stores. But, according to Abacus, a British-run, Netherlands-based technology company, c-store operators are seeing a worrying correlation between self-checkout lanes and lottery sales. “Based on conversations with several major U.S. retailers,” said Mike Purcell, head of retail at Abacus, “adding self-checkout lanes in stores resulted in 10% to 40% drops in lottery sales. It’s making lottery less visible.”

The issue that convenience store owners face is simple: as customers increasingly gravitate toward self-checkout lanes and digital experiences, traditional lottery terminals—typically anchored at staffed counters—don’t seem very convenient.

“Retail—and the c-store environment in particular—is changing,” said Simon Butler, CEO of Abacus. “We need lottery to respond to that change.”

Rather than asking retailers or customers to alter their behavior, it’s time to flip the model: Bring the lottery to the systems that retailers are already using and where customers already are.

“It’s about convenience, isn’t it?” said Paul Lawson, chief technology officer and chief security officer at Abacus. “It’s taking the lottery away from traditional lottery sale points, which is traditionally the only place that you can buy a lottery ticket, and putting it in front of all of your customers, across multiple touch points—whether that’s mobile or e-com or self-checkout lanes.”

That was the goal of a North American Association of State and Provincial Lotteries’ (NASPL) initiative almost 10 years ago, Lawson explained. “NASPL wanted to enable lottery integration at checkout lanes rather than dedicated customer service stations, so it set out to standardize retail integration via a common API so that large retailers like Circle K or Kroger could implement a single integration method across all U.S. jurisdictions.”

Continue reading “Lottery in Every Lane” in the September 2025 issue of NACS Magazine.