Bonnie Blue region’s lone high-speed lotto vendor

FORT FRANCES—Participating in a Ontario Lottery and Gaming Commission pilot project, the Bonnie Blue on Scott Street is the only business with a high-speed lotto terminal in Northwestern Ontario.
But Bonnie Blue owner Barb Stainke admitted Thursday morning that getting to this point had has its “hiccups.”
“A little while ago, I was picked by the lottery corporation to be part of their test project for high-speed for the lottery terminal,” she noted.
“It went on for a while and we didn’t have any problems,” she added. “Then, about a month-and-a-half ago, we had problems—everybody in the test project got knocked out of the system.
“For some reason, we had an extremely hard time getting back into the system, and they had to disconnect the system to get us back in,” continued Stainke.
“They have now reconnected us to the high-speed, and we are the only one in the Thunder Bay region that has high-speed.”
With the high-speed lottery terminal, said Stainke, “there’s a major difference in the service that can be provided to the customers.”
“There’s no extra services, but the speed is phenomenal,” she noted.
Stainke wanted local lottery ticket-buyers to know that at one point in the past month, the Bonnie Blue’s lottery terminal had been on- and off-line for about one week, but it’s now running at 100 percent.
“Everything’s good now,” she pledged.
But that period of downtime had some Bonnie Blue regulars concerned.
Stainke noted that when she put a sign in the window saying a technician was coming to fix the terminal on a particular day and time, “everybody was sort of congregating to see what was happening with the terminal.”
“‘Is it working yet? Can we buy tickets here?’” Stainke recalled, referring to customer comments.
As a point of interest, Stainke said the Bonnie Blue is one of the oldest lottery terminals in Ontario—and one of the biggest in the area.
“When we have sales competitions, I have to compete with Thunder Bay or southern Ontario. I can’t compete in our area, based on our sales,” she noted.
“And I don’t fit the typical lottery scenario in any way, shape, or form—we’re a little abnormal in that way,” she added.
(Fort Frances Daily Bulletin)