Selling your lottery business and keeping your shop might be a smart move
More newsagents outside of Western Australia are selling their lottery business. Not because they’re struggling — because they’re thinking ahead. I am seeing this move more and I guess others are too.
Some do it while winding down. The lottery licence has value, selling it separately makes the exit numbers work better than a whole-of-business sale. That’s been happening for years.
What’s newer is the transformation sale. Retailers actively rebuilding what their shop is and who it serves are looking at their lottery setup and seeing floor space, staff time, and capital locked into a product they no longer control.
The Lottery Corporation’s direction isn’t hard to read. Digital. Direct. Their money is going into moving lottery players onto their own platform. Every campaign pushing customers to the app reduces the long-term value of a retail licence. Newsagents paying attention are moving before the market moves for them.
Selling in that context isn’t giving up ground. It’s freeing it up.
The footprint a lottery terminal takes matters when you’re rebuilding a shop around gifts, collectibles, or homewares. That space earns more doing something else. The capital from the sale funds the change. The staff hours no longer absorbed by lottery transactions go somewhere that actually builds the business.
Buyers are around. Supermarkets adding a service draw. Chemists expanding their convenience offer. Standalone operators shifting the whole thing to a kiosk. For those buyers the licence fits traffic they already have. For the newsagent selling, it’s a clean separation.
This isn’t the right move for every retailer. If lottery is still generating foot traffic that converts into other purchases, the calculation is different. But look honestly at what lottery customers buy beyond their ticket. In a lot of shops the answer is not much.
The Aussie newsagency channel is mid-transition – well, for most retailers at least.
The retailers shaping what comes next are making deliberate decisions about what stays in the business and what doesn’t. Lottery deserves that same deliberate look — not held onto by habit just because it’s always been there.
I haven’t had lotteries in my newsagency businesses for 14 years now. It’s not necessary for success. What I love about not having it, having had it for years, is to not have to deal with what I personally found to be a bullying partner who thought they knew about newsagency retail, when they didn’t.