Lottery ticket sales and pet industry spending have grown together for nineteen years, achieving a 0.97 correlation that suggests Americans are channeling hope in two complementary directions: toward pets, who are certain to love them, and toward lottery tickets, which are certain not to. Both industries are booming. Both promise something ineffable. One of them occasionally delivers.
Both lottery spending and pet spending are consumer staples with unusual resilience to economic downturns, but driven by different forces. Lottery sales correlate strongly with population growth and are somewhat countercyclical — people buy more tickets during stress. Pet industry spending is predominantly income-elastic and has grown as the humanization trend lifted per-household pet expenditure from a few hundred to over a thousand dollars annually. Both series have risen fairly continuously from 2005 to 2023 as the US population grew and consumer categories matured, which is sufficient to produce a high correlation even without any causal link.
Two industries can each grow reliably and in parallel without knowing the other exists. The correlation is a feature of time and growth, not of any underlying relationship — which is, in a way, the entire lesson of this website.
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Want to learn more about why correlations like “US lottery ticket sales” vs “US pet industry spending” don't prove causation? Read our guide to statistical thinking.
