Post
Topic
Board Economics
Re: How popular is salary lottery in your workspace?
by
Fortify
on 01/07/2025, 19:25:40 UTC
In my region, salary lotteries are very popular in many workplaces. I don't know what's the exact English term for his but we call it that name. The purpose of salary lottery is that 5-6 employees collect together and they play lottery. The first winner gets the salary of every worker, in the next months the second winner gets everyone's salary and that's it. There isn't a random winner, everyone gets their salary back but the fate of who is the first person to receive the salary is decided via a simple coin flip.

For example, imagine that there are 6 people and salary of each person is $1000. They determine via coin flip who is the 1st, 2nd, 3rd, 4th, 5th and 6th. First gets $6000 in the end of the month, in the next month, the second gets $6000 and in 6th month, the 6th person gets $6000. You may ask me how do they live for 6 months without a salary? Family members take care of them. Too many people work for fun because sitting at home is boring for them but they don't have enough money to have fun too.

I've heard of this sort of thing in parts of Asia but it might be common in many places, it just seems like poor financial planning to me and being perpetually needing to pay money out that you may have already spent a long time ago. You really have to trust that the other people in the group will honor their commitment and not become incapable of payment. If someone needed to borrow money, which is effectively what is happening here just on a constant and looping basis, then they would simply approach a bank as an individual to ask for the cash. If you cannot manage your money well enough to have fun without entering such a scheme, then you probably have bigger problems and if you are person number 6 then you'll probably be waiting around at home doing nothing for 6 months anyway by your own analogy. The whole thing seems like a mess.