LITTLE ROCK — With a record Mega Millions jackpot estimated at $640 million, Sheila Roy of Little Rock and thousands of other Arkansans felt “real lucky” as Friday night’s drawing neared.
By late Friday afternoon, the Arkansas lottery’s Mega Millions ticket sales totaled $1.9 million for the day, exceeding the previous daily record of $1.5 million on Jan. 4, 2011, when the jackpot was about $360 million, lottery spokesman Julie Baldridge said.
She said she expected a rush of people at lottery retailers late Friday to buy tickets.
Nationwide, Americans were expected to buy nearly $1.5 billion worth of tickets.
Some lottery retailers in Arkansas reported that lines of people formed earlier in the day as customers, some of whom had never purchased lottery tickets before, waited to purchase tickets.
Lottery ticket lines swelled at lottery retailers in many other states as well.
“I hope somebody wins it,” said Mayso Green, a cashier at the Phillips 66 store along Highway 10 in west Little Rock.
Some people who showed up at the store wanting to purchase tickets were confused because they didn’t understand how to play the game, he said.
“Everybody is playing it now because of all the publicity it is getting [about the record jackpot],” Green said.
Miguel Lopez, a cashier at Max Mart on Highway 10 in west Little Rock, said one customer purchased $340 worth of Mega Millions tickets.
“I tell people, ‘You can’t catch a fish if you don’t have a hook in the water,’’’ he said.
If a lottery player wins the jackpot, he would have the choice of a lump sum payment or an annuity, Baldridge said.
The lump sum payment would be about $462 million minus a 32 percent deduction for state and federal taxes, she said. The state’s taxes would amount to about $32 million.
The annuity would be 26 payments of $24.6 million, she said.
The retailer that sold the winning ticket would get $50,000, Baldridge said.
Yet the odds of winning a Mega Millions jackpot with a single ticket are 1 in 175,711,536, according to the Arkansas lottery.
The odds of dying while driving to the convenience store are higher than the odds of collecting the jackpot, statisticians say. Based on other U.S. averages, people are about 8,000 times more likely to be murdered than to win the lottery jackpot, and about 20,000 times more likely to die in a car crash than hit the lucky numbers, according to Dakota Wesleyan mathematics professor Mike Catalano.
“You might get some psychological enjoyment from playing the lottery, but from a financial standpoint ... you’d be much better off going to Las Vegas and playing blackjack or the slot machines,” Catalano said.
Despite the low odds of winning the jackpot, Roy, who is a Little Rock nurse, said, “I feel real lucky today.”
She said she couldn’t explain why she felt that way after she purchased a Mega Millions ticket at the Super Stop store on Colonel Glenn Road.
“Whenever I feel real lucky, I even go the [Isle of Capri] casino,” she said, referring to a Mississippi gambling spot. “It’s like a urge. ... Yesterday, my hand kept itching, [and] I am like ‘I have to go do something.’ I just feel lucky. I won $500 just last week.”
If she wins the jackpot, she said she would give about 300 relatives $1,000,000 apiece.
“That’s a lot of money so you can spread that money out and still have a lot of money leftover. I am going to give my kids like $2 [million] or $3 million apiece, so everybody can be rich,” Roy said.
Jazen Powell of Little Rock, who refers people who get into automobile accidents to chiropractors, said he purchased a ticket at Super Stop because the $640 million jackpot “catches anybody’s eye.”
“Somebody has got to win,” he said. He said he usually purchases a lottery ticket each week.
If he wins the jackpot, Powell said, he will buy a Bentley car, a home for his four children, put money in the bank for his children, and “make sure their child support is paid.”
Powell added that he would probably give half of his winnings “to homeless people” and “do something real nice for the people who are the have-nots.”
Across the country, ticket buyers were dreaming about how the winning numbers would transform their life.
Everett Eahmer of St. Paul, Minn., said, “If I win, the first thing I am going to do is buy a [Tim] Tebow football shirt, and I’m going to do the Tebow pose. I’m with him in honoring a higher power.”
Tebow is a quarterback for the New York Jets known for kneeling in prayer at football games.
The ticket sales for the Mega Millions jackpot game started increasing for the Arkansas lottery on Feb. 29 when the jackpot increased to $108 million, according to Baldridge.
The ticket sales increased from about $548,000 from March 4-March 10 to about $702,000 from March 11-17. They climbed to $1.07 million from March 18-24 and to $2.52 million from Sunday-Thursday, she said.
Baldridge said the Arkansas lottery always “amps up our advertising when a jackpot tops $100 million and again at $200 million and $300 million [and] redistribute the ads so we go lighter on other areas and heavier on the ticket with the large jackpot.”
About 35 percent of the lottery’s net proceeds for college scholarships come from Mega Millions ticket sales, she said.
The Arkansas lottery has raised about $238 million for college scholarships since it started selling tickets Sept. 28, 2009.
Information for this article was contributed by The Associated Press.
Arkansas, Pages 11 on 03/31/2012