Despite Powerball Odds, a Mad Rush to the Registers

Mayra Beltran/Houston Chronicle, via Associated Press

HOUSTON Hortcina Martinez, who plays Powerball weekly, shouted with excitement on Wednesday in hopes of winning the $550 million jackpot.

NEW ORLEANS — All across this recession-weary country on Wednesday, Americans of every rank and station lined up at convenience stores and delis, placed their hard-earned dollars on countertops and took part in a venerated national tradition: trying to get really rich without doing anything.

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HOLLYWOOD, FLA. Some who hoped to win the large jackpot filled out their numbers at the Circle News Stand.

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Kevin Clark/The Register-Guard, via Associated Press

HARRISBURG, ORE. Monty Jelden picked up his Powerball tickets at the EZ Stop Market & Deli on Tuesday.

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WHITE HILLS, ARIZ. Residents from California and Nevada lined up outside the Arizona Last Stop gas station.

“You want to retire tomorrow?” Vijay Patel asked his customers at Lanzilli’s Groceria in East Boston, where Powerball tickets were constantly being churned out by the lottery machines. “A lot of action today. Good luck.”

At $550 million, the Powerball jackpot on Wednesday was the second-largest lottery jackpot in United States history. In March, the Mega Millions prize was $656 million, which was and still is, in the words of Michael Jones, the superintendent of the Illinois Lottery, the “largest lottery prize in the history of the solar system.”

Both of these sums are of such a scale that they seem to muddle a person’s ability to calculate probabilities. A woman in Denver bought $450 in tickets on Tuesday. People in Nevada, which does not participate in Powerball, have been calling the Arizona Last Stop, a bar/restaurant/gas station right across the state line, to ask about sending busloads of ticket buyers from Las Vegas.

On Wednesday alone, Floridians had spent more than $10 million by 2 p.m. on Powerball tickets. So many people had bought tickets nationwide, said David Bishop, a spokesman for the Florida Lottery, that there was a 75 percent chance that one or more of the combinations picked will match the combination drawn on Wednesday night.

Most of the buyers interviewed on Wednesday acknowledged that their chances were not especially good.

A standard practice in news media coverage is to compare lottery odds unfavorably with odds of dying in peculiar ways (shark attack, lightning), but even that morbid exercise does not do justice to the long shot. The odds of picking the winning numbers in Wednesday’s drawing were longer than the odds of picking an American man completely at random and having him happen to be Alan Alda.

Granted, the odds are slightly better than they were last year. This year, the officials who oversee Powerball, a game consisting of five numbered white balls and one red ball, reduced the number of red balls to 35 from 39. They also doubled the price of a ticket to $2, but the increase in the size of the jackpot has apparently overcome any sticker shock from the new, higher-priced tickets. There is math, and there is wishful thinking. The contest between the two is not even close.

“It only takes one to win,” said Katherine Scott, amid the lunch-hour traffic at a 7-Eleven in Chicago. “I bought two.”

Ken Menno, who has been buying Powerball tickets every week for years, bought five on Wednesday morning at a Shell station in Denver.

“If I win, I’m going to buy this joint,” he said. “And send everyone here on a vacation.”

Lines were particularly long in places that sat just over the line from the few states that do not participate in Powerball, places like the Purple Cow convenience store in Slidell, La., a few minutes’ drive from the Mississippi border.

And some people seem to have decided that certain stores are just luckier than others.

One of the three winning tickets from the $656 million Mega Millions prize was sold at the MotoMart convenience store in Red Bud, Ill., about an hour southeast of St. Louis. The electronic marquee outside on Wednesday read “Lightning can strike twice!” which is inarguable. Enough people believed it could strike twice at this MotoMart that the store doubled the number of working staff members to accommodate the rush.

“It’s constant traffic,” said Denise Metzger, the manager. She declined to release her sales numbers because they were so high she feared she would be robbed.

Some buyers, like Katie Flom, 28, who works at an advertising agency in Chicago, still had rather ill-formed ideas of what to do with all of that money.

“I’d first buy a plane ticket somewhere warm and then figure it out from there,” she said.

But she appeared to be in the minority.

Despite the long odds and the cautionary tales about past winners, most people knew exactly what they would do, the bills they would pay, the student debt they would retire, the charity they would start or the car they would finally send to the dump.

Outside the Viva Deli in East Harlem in New York, Manny Colon talked of buying his two daughters a house and setting aside college tuition for grandchildren and great-grandchildren.

“They’re the ones that are coming up,” said Mr. Colon, a retired doorman, smiling at his wife of 61 years. “We’re all right.”

His wife, Gloria, nodded. Then, she added: “I would like to go to Hawaii.”

Reporting was contributed by Jess Bidgood in Boston, Ian Lovett in Los Angeles, Dan Frosch in Denver, Steven Yaccino in Chicago, Kia Gregory in New York and David Thier in Slidell, La.

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