By Carol Tannenhauser
A narrow convenience store hidden by scaffolding on 72nd Street sold three winning lottery tickets this past week, together worth $8.3 million, according to New York Lottery.
The store’s name? Lucky Choice!
“So??” I greeted Ali, the clerk at Lucky Choice Convenience, on 72nd Street between Columbus and Amsterdam, by phone, at 7 a.m., on Friday morning.
“How do you feel??” I asked, breathlessly.
“Good,” Ali answered.
“I mean, about the lottery…you know, three tickets from this one store…what are the odds? Do you think it has something to do with the name?”
“Maybe.”
There was no getting a rise out of him! It was just another day at the office.
No one has yet called or come in to present the winning tickets, Ali said, but he promised to call WSR if anyone does. It was not immediately clear if all three tickets had been bought by the same person or were purchased by multiple people (which seems unlikely given that the odds of winning the top lottery prize are 1 in 45 million). Each winning ticket is worth $2.76 million, before taxes.
Winners, if you’re out there, congratulations, and let us know!
What are the economics of the store owner who sold the tickets? I think he gets something but how much?
Interesting. The person who bought the ticket must have had a very strong intuition that those numbers would win. He must have reasoned that if he played it once some other person might play it and would equally share the jackpot. If he played it 3 times and someone else won, he would get 3 quarters of the total.
Could have also been giving a ticket to each neice/nephew but didn’t want the drama if one won(even $100) and the others didn’t so got the same numbers.
Ouch…this comment hurts my brain.
Wow, congratulations to the store and the winner(s). I have been playing for a long time in Texas, all the games, and I know one day is going to be ME!
You’ve got to be in it to win it.
All you need is a dollar and a dream.
Hey, you never know.
You always know.
It would be interesting to know if the winning tickets numbers were generated via quick pick, scanned in from a manual ticket or if they appeared in one of those “lucky number” sheets some of the vendors sell.
If they were quick picks the lottery folks need to take a second look at the logarithms used to generate quick picks as the odds for generating three identical series of numbers randomly at the same store’s terminal would be astronomical.
They were not Quick Picks– The NY Lottery website writes QP next to winning #s if they were Quick Picks, and these show no such indication.
“The lottery is a tax on people who can’t do math”
1 to 45 million?!! I agree with RK. DO THE MATH.
All you need is a dollar and a dream, but isn’t it $2.00?
Lucky Choice is my go to place for lottery tickets glad he sold it, wondering about the lucky 3? Hope to hear soon a real westside mystery.