$250,000 lottery winner cried for about 15 minutes
By Samantha Lyles
Staff Writer
slyles@newsandpress.net
An unidentified woman walked into a Darlington convenience store recently and asked the cashier to choose a $10 scratch-off lottery ticket for her.
The cashier cannily selected a ticket for a new game, just started on June 23 of this year, which likely meant that most of the top prizes were still available.
The customer presented photo identification, required at this store to purchase lottery tickets, and took her $250,000 Ca$h In game ticket to the back of the store, where she scratched away the opaque dollar signs concealing her fate.
“My cashier said the lady stood back there crying for about 15 minutes,” says Bryan Clark, store manager for Young’s # 3609 on North Main Street, “and that’s when she told my employee what had happened.”
The woman won the game’s top prize of $250,000, beating the 1 in 780,000 odds of winning. The winner later told officials with the South Carolina Education Lottery that she threw her hands up and wept from sheer disbelief.
“I still can’t believe it. … I’m in shock,” she reportedly said.
The dazed mindset evidently didn’t prevent her from resuming her normal schedule. The woman told lottery reps that she left the store with a quarter-million dollar ticket in hand and drove to work like it was any other day.
It was a lucky day for Young’s as well; the store received a commission of $2,500 for selling the claimed ticket. Clark says that since folks learned of the big win, lottery ticket sales have increased at his store.
“We do sell a lot more scratch tickets now,” says Clark, noting that Young’s # 3609 has sold two $10,000 winning tickets in the past three months.
With each ticket sale, Clark bids the customer “good luck.” And, once in a while, that invocation of felicity actually works.