State abuzz over $1.6 billion Mega Millions jackpot

BRYANT — After asking the manager at the Superstop store here for several Mega Millions tickets Monday, Sharon Hall of Bauxite asked her, “Am I nuts?”

Store manager Jamie Clark promptly replied, “Everybody is doing it.”

After no one won the $1 billion Mega Millions jackpot drawing Friday night, the jackpot increased to an estimated $1.6 billion for tonight’s drawing in the multistate lottery.

It will be the largest lottery prize in U.S. history when someone finally hits it.

The previous record prize was hit Jan. 12, 2016, when the Powerball jackpot, another multistate lottery, totaled $1.586 billion. The winning tickets were sold in California, Florida and Tennessee. The Powerball and Mega Millions jackpots have increased in recent years because lottery officials changed the odds to lessen the chance of winning a jackpot, which in turn increased the likelihood that top prizes would reach stratospheric levels.

With the Mega Millions jackpot this high “we get a lot of people coming in and buying like hundreds [of tickets] at a time,” said Clark. “They pool together and go with people they work with, and we get a lot of that when it gets high.

“Then, we get a lot of people that have never played before and come out,” Clark said. “It’s a crazy amount of

money. Everybody wants a piece of it.”

The Arkansas Scholarship Lottery’s total ticket sales and Mega Millions ticket sales “have been excellent so far,” compared with the figures from the January 2016 Powerball jackpot, said state lottery Director Bishop Woosley.

“The Mega sales have been very good, but the fact that Powerball is also very high at $620 million has impacted those sales to some extent,” Woosley said late Monday afternoon in a written statement.

“We won’t know until later today and tomorrow, if we will match the sales for the previous

1.6 billion dollar jackpot, but we are in an excellent place right now with two jackpots going, which total more than 2 billion dollars,” he said.

“Our total draw sales for Sunday were $528,653, which was the second highest Sunday for draw sales ever. We hope that’s an indication of good sales to come,” Woosley said.

The lotteries are called draw games. Scratch-off tickets are instant games.

Bolstered by the big Powerball jackpot in January 2016, the lottery collected $58.7 million in revenue and raised $13.8 million for college scholarships that month. That is the record for any month since the lottery started selling tickets on Sept. 28, 2009. The lottery has helped finance more than 30,000 Arkansas Academic

Challenge Scholarships during each of the past several fiscal years.

Asked whether the lottery will set a record for revenue and net proceeds based on the $1.6 billion Mega Millions jackpot, Woosley replied that, “We hope so.

“We won’t know until both of these jackpots are hit. In any event, we are enjoying excellent sales right now and should compete with the best months in Arkansas lottery history,” he said.

So far, the lottery’s record for total revenue for the month of October was $46.3 million collected in 2009, while the record for net proceeds — the amount raised for college scholarships — in that month was $9.8 million in 2010.

With the two large pots

of money, Woosley said “we have increased our spend [on advertising] and have moved our focus from the October instant campaign to cover both jackpots.”

October is the fourth month of fiscal 2019, which started July 1. During the first three months of fiscal 2019, total revenue was $117.9 million, down from $122.6 million during the same period in fiscal 2018.

Scratch-off revenue reached $96.4 million during the first three months of fiscal 2019 — up slightly from $95.4 million in the same period last fiscal year — while draw-game revenue totaled $21.3 million in the first quarter this fiscal year, a drop from $26.9 million in the same period a year ago.

So far in fiscal 2019, the total

raised for scholarships is $19 million — a decline from $22.2 million a year ago.

For all of fiscal 2019, Woosley has projected revenue of $482.9 million and net proceeds for scholarships at $85.9 million. In fiscal 2018, the lottery raised $91.9 million for scholarships, the third-largest amount in its nine years of operation. Also last fiscal year, the lottery collected a record $500.4 million.

Meanwhile, Hall said she comes to the Superstop store in Bryant five days a week to buy lottery tickets.

The store has become the Arkansas Scholarship Lottery’s top ticket seller. A few years ago, it dislodged an Arkansas County retailer from the top spot and outsells more than 1,900 other lottery retailers. The store, Y&E Superstop, is near the Reynolds Road exit of Interstate 30, west of Ashley’s Furniture and southwest of the Cracker Barrel and WalMart store.

“I am too ashamed to tell you how much” she spends on lottery tickets, Hall said. “This is my favorite store because they get more of a selection here.

“But I am doing it for the fun of it because millions of other people are,” said Hall, who said she is a cashier at another gas station and convenience store.

“I have won a lot of money here. I won $500 and $600 here,” said Hall. “I like to win money and shop. I am a girl.”