‘IT’S FUN TO THINK ABOUT GOOD THINGS THAT YOU COULD DO’

Jobless rate may be high, but hopes of $60-million lottery win spring eternal

“I play the same numbers every week. I come to the same store to buy my tickets. I stick with what I know.”

On Friday morning, Jesus Ajoste has already made his regular stop at a 7-Eleven store in the city’s southwest, well aware that the Lotto Max jackpot for later in the day is $60 million.

“You can do a lot with that much money,” he says as ticket buyers come and go. “I’ve been working four jobs and business is slow everywhere.”

There is one thing Ajoste doesn’t know, though, when we meet up outside the store in Shawnessy: it just happens to be the place that sold one of the biggest winning tickets ever in Calgary — $30 million to carpenter Darrell Szczerba.

Learning about the thenrecord payout doesn’t dissuade Ajoste from sticking to his usual purchase spot. “It could be good, it could be bad,” he says with a smile. “But I am thinking maybe it’s a good thing; maybe this is a lucky place.”

Indeed, over the past few years gas stations and convenience stores seem to have a pretty good track record when it comes to producing local millionaires.

Last year, Nabila Batarseh won $12.5 million in the Lotto Max, purchased at a 7-Eleven in the northwest; Tania White’s 2014 win of $1 million was thanks to a local Esso station; and in 2013, Julie Kelly bought a winning $1.6 million Lotto 6/49 ticket when she stopped at a Safeway gas bar.

Still, the biggest local winner of all, Tom Crist, won his $40 million through a Lotto Max subscription. Since his win, the retired Calgary businessman has been keeping good on his promise to quietly donate winnings to charity.

While the recent downturn has been hurting the sales of some charity lotteries, the $5 and $6 cost of lotteries like Lotto Max seem not only to be recessionproof, but recession-fuelled.

A 2009 study done at New York’s Cornell University found a strong positive correlation between lottery ticket sales and poverty rates in several American states, boosting the age-old adage of the lottery being a tax on the desperate.

Then, of course, there are the plain hard facts about the odds: according to those who crunch the numbers, a person’s chances of winning a big jackpot are around one in 15 million. Compare that to the chance of being hit by lightning, which is only one in a million; and, after all of the thunder and lightning storms our city has seen in the past month, that doesn’t seem like much of a long shot.

Not surprisingly then, on the same day that Stats Can reports that at 8.6 per cent, Calgary now has the highest unemployment rate in the country, lottery ticket sellers across the city are kept hopping.

“We had to bring extra staff on to handle it,” says Betty, who works in a southwest convenience store. (She can’t give her last name as head office wouldn’t approve.) “It’s always insane when the jackpot goes over $30 million,” she adds.

That’s what has Jo Wong happy to line up at a Mac’s store in the inner city. “I know everybody says you can’t win if you don’t buy a ticket,” she says. “I only buy when it gets really, really high.”

I, too, give in to the temptation to make a lottery ticket purchase once in a blue moon, especially when the pot goes to $60 million.

I can’t even imagine what the odds would be of winning the big one at the same store that only three years ago turned Darrell and Laurie Szczerba into millionaires times 30.

So, I instead find myself a quiet little drug store in a neighbourhood strip mall and buy my ticket. On my way out, a guy in a giant truck comes within an inch of running me over in the parking lot — which has me rethinking this whole luck thing.

Still, the hope of striking it rich overnight keeps people like Jesus Ajoste buying tickets again and again.

“I would pay off the houses of all my family and I’d sponsor some kids back home in the Philippines,” he says. “It’s fun to just think about all the good things you could do.”

I would pay off the houses of all my family and I’d sponsor some kids back home in the Philippines. It’s fun to just think about all the good things you could do.