[cowsandmilk]

> I wasn't sure of the ethics of skewing the odds against your customers like this anyway.

This is interesting because I don’t think anyone would view the store as unethical for continuing to sell tickets from a roll when they know there have already been X winners from that role and therefore customer odds have gone down.

[kerkeslager]

I think the mental peculiarity here only makes sense if you're viewing the two situations in isolation. If the retailer is selling the whole roll to customers and buys none themselves every time, their knowledge of how many winners have been sold is irrelevant because that's exactly how everyone expects the game to work and no one is leveraging insider information against anyone.

The problem with selling out the roll when winning tickets have already been sold only occurs in tandem with the retailer buying remaining tickets when only non-winners have been sold so far. These aren't separable situations.