Powerball jackpot draws throngs of ticket-buyers

The whopping $280 million Powerball jackpot jumped to $314.9 million shortly before the numbers were drawn Wednesday, making it the highest jackpot ever for the multistate lottery.

The new figure came after holiday sales were much higher than expected, said Joe Mahoney, a spokesman for the Multi-State Lottery Association.

"We were always planning on Wednesday, Christmas Day, to be a very light day for sales," Mahoney said. Christmas "was much higher than we anticipated it to be."

But since gas stations and convenience stores -- typical lottery retailers -- were open Christmas Day, throngs of people ventured out to get a piece of the action.

"We've had a steady stream of customers buying them all day," said Blake Rister, an Amoco clerk at the store on William Street in Cape Girardeau. "With it being this high, people buy anywhere from five to 20 tickets."

Rister said some customers will usually talk to him about what they plan to do with the money if they win big, but on Christmas Day no one shared any big spending plans when paying for their tickets.

"That's about all I'm selling today," said Mike Green, manager of a QuikTrip in Des Moines. "A lot of people are buying them for gifts."

At a Kum & Go convenience store in Des Moines, customers bought as many as 100 tickets apiece, including Richard Nichols, who stopped by before Christmas dinner. He didn't think it was a big purchase.

"When you don't buy them very often, it's not that much," said Nichols. "We're just about ready to eat, so, I said, 'I got to do an errand here.'"

Powerball, the nation's largest lottery game, is run by the Multi-State Lottery Association and is played in 23 states, the District of Columbia and the U.S. Virgin Islands.

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Ticket sales in Iowa were considerably lower Wednesday than on Christmas Eve, said Mary Neubauer, spokeswoman for the Iowa Lottery.

"We expected people to go out and do their last-minute shopping, including their Powerball shopping, yesterday and then be at home today," Neubauer said.

To help last-minute Powerball players find their way to a ticket, the District of Columbia Lottery took out an ad in Wednesday's Washington Post, listing about 90 places open Christmas Day that sell the tickets.

One first-time player, Bill Sanders, 60, of Mission, Kan., bought his ticket Wednesday from a gas station.

If the single ticket he bought is the winner, "I'd probably travel the world and live a lot different than I do now."

The game's second-largest jackpot was $295.7 million in July 1998. Last summer, it reached $295 million before it was won.

The biggest lottery jackpot in U.S. history was a Big Game prize of $363 million, won in May 2000 by ticketholders in Michigan and Illinois.

Staff writer Mike Wells contributed to this report.