COLLINGSWOOD, New Jersey − Among the customers stopping into the Speedy Mart on an early evening for cigarettes, fried chicken, snacks and soft drinks were a steady stream of big dreamers.
The Powerball lottery jackpot hit $1.3 billion as of Sept. 2, and a lot of the people who stopped into Jaywin Patel's Collingswood, New Jersey, store wanted to win (at least a sizable piece of it). Their chances may be slimmer than a slice of deli meat from Patel's counter, though: The odds of winning the jackpot in the drawing Sept. 3, according to the Powerball website, are 1 in 292.2 million.
"We get a lot of winners," said Patel, who owns another Speedy Mart in Audubon, a few miles away. "I sold a $200,000 scratch-off not long ago." While he wasn't sure what his share would be for selling a ticket worth more than a billion bucks, he smiled just thinking about it.
Customers who came in to buy tickets for the drawing were smiling, too.
The secret formula for picking winning numbers − at least for those who didn't let the machine choose random numbers for them − seemed to be birthdates, specifically those of the players' kids and grandkids.
