Westside Pizza Lottery

I don’t mind promoting Westside Pizza in Belfair. Like the other Westside franchises, they make great pizza, and I’m a frequent customer. This week Westside held a pizza lottery. The prize: a free one-topping medium pizza. Let’s look at the odds of winning.

First I’ll admit that I don’t know what they mean by “westside” although I like the name. That’s because I think of myself as living on the west side. That is, thankfully, well west of the I-5 corridor and the crowded sprawl that stretches from Everett to Olympia.

But as for the pizza chain itself, west of what? In Washington alone there are more than 20 locations with about one-third of them located east of the Cascade mountains, which serve as both a geographical and a cultural dividing line in the state. So they aren’t limited to just the “westside.” Perhaps Westside Pizza started in the Seattle area and with a great product opened franchises wherever they can. Clearly local customers care more about the pizza than the name.

Back to the pizza lottery. I participated but didn’t win. The instructions in the text message said that to enter the lottery all you had to do was reply with a number between 1 and 100. My entry was 49. So were the odds 1 in 100 of winning?

Apparently Westside’s largesse is greater than that. They replied to my entry with a list of the winning numbers. There are 10 and the list appears to be random. They also let me down easy by calling me a winner anyway and offering 20 percent off on my next order.

I’m somewhat math challenged, but it seems to me that participants who entered a valid number had a 1 in 10 chance of winning. That is, out of 100 possible numbers someone might text in, 10 of those possibilities would result in a free pizza. Those are pretty good odds. Washington Lotto are you listening?

It wasn’t clear from the text message if Westside plans to make this a weekly event. The message just said that “this week” you could win a free pizza. If they do keep up the promotion, their timing is great. With NFL games that count starting soon and the MLB playoffs about six weeks out, pizza season is upon us.