There were plenty of reasons to be outside on a sunny Saturday morning in early April. Yet the inside of a convenience store on Connecticut Avenue in Norwalk was buzzing with activity near the lottery counter, with several people scratching tickets and others calling out strings of numbers to be fed into the terminal for the daily lottery draw in hopes of hitting it big.
If hitting it big is what the folks at One Stop Variety in Norwalk were looking to do, they were in the right place. A Hearst Connecticut Media Group analysis of lottery winners over the last four years shows that the store, which is in a strip mall near Exit 14 of Interstate-95, has sold more lottery tickets with prizes of $10,000 or greater than any other store in Southwestern Connecticut.
Between April 2009 and late March 2013, One Stop Variety sold 11 big winners, putting the store in a tie with a Shop Smart in Seymour and a Stop & Shop in Branford for top retailers in the state in that time.
“We sell a lot of lottery tickets here,” said Sohel Memon, a cashier who has worked at the store for two years. “People buy all of it, the scratch-off tickets, everything.”
But there’s one ticket played with more success than any other, he said.
“We get the most winners on 10X Cash,” he said, walking over to a plastic display case, where the $10 ticket was sitting in a cubby, labeled No. 44 of the more than 50 varieties of tickets the store had for sale.
Victor Figueroa, 47, of Stamford is one of three people who have earned a $10,000 prize as a result of buying that particular ticket at the Norwalk store, in what he called “a lucky shot.”
“Sometimes I stop in that store in the morning, when the guys I work with are grabbing breakfast at the deli in that strip mall,” he said Wednesday evening. “It’s just down the street from where I work, so I’ll play a little here or there. Not every day, but if I’m there in the morning, I’ll probably get a $5 or $10 scratch-off, whatever I have in my pocket.”
On Feb. 5, he happened to have $10 in his pocket, and after a few scratches on a 10X Cash, he soon had $10,000. It wasn’t the first time Figueroa won big at the store. In October of 2012, he won $10,000 on a $5 scratch-off ticket, purchased at the same store. Still, he says he likes the odds best on 10X Cash.
“You know, it’s funny, believe it or not, my neighbor across the street won $10,000 on 10X in downtown Stamford a couple months before I won on it,” he said. “It’s a good game — a lucky one.”
In addition to the three $10,000 winners One Stop Variety has sold for that ticket, there have also been smaller winners trickling through the teller on a regular basis, said Memon, who pointed to a string of banners taped to the walls and called out winners who have taken home $550, $2,000 and $5,000 from the ticket.
Maggie Gordon takes a swing at scratching off a ticket in hopes of pocketing a few bucks.
I tried my hand at hitting a jackpot, buying a 10X Cash of my own and crossing my fingers before putting them to work, scratching for glory. The purple ticket was decorated in Vegas-style lights, calling out reasons to play, such as “More than 100 $10,000 prizes,” “More than $17,000,000 in total prizes,” and “10 chances to win!”
It seemed simple. There was a column labeled “Your number,” to the left of another column labeled “Winning number.” All I had to do was hope the two numbers matched in any of the 10 rows, and I could win the prize hidden behind the three sacks of cash, just waiting to be scratched off.
I started slowly: My No. 23, winning No 58. Darn.
My No. 30, winning No. 53. Darn again.
By the 10th row (my No. 55, winning No. 46) my reaction was more damn than darn. I never even scratched the money sacks to see what I could have won.
Memon asked if I wanted to try again, but at $10 a pop, and with only $20 in my pocket, one failure was enough for me. A moment later, Gwen Grimes from Bridgeport bought the next ticket in the line.
“Nothing so far,” she murmured as her hand moved halfway down the card. By the end of the ticket, she declared that she had bought a dud.
While 10X Cash is the winningest scratch-off in the state, during the four years analyzed, with 102 winners claiming $10,000 or more, the ticket only pays out a winner once in every 3.95 tickets on average. While One Stop Variety has had more big winners than any other store in the state on the 10X Cash card, Stamford is home to the most large winners on the ticket than any other town.
Stamford has sold more lottery tickets paying out $10,000 or more than any other city in the state, with a total of 51 such payouts in the four-year period, including a $1 million Powerball ticket sold at Shippan Candies, which brought a windfall upon a group of employees at Toyota of Stamford in November 2012 and a $254 million Powerball prize sold nearby at the Shippan Point Getty in November 2011.
The city of Norwalk has sold the second-most big prizes, with 44, thanks in large part to One Stop Variety, and is tied with Bridgeport for the No. 2 spot. Danbury follows at No. 4, with 42 wins, and New Haven rounds out the top 5 with 36 winning tickets paying out $10,000 or more.
But while the city of Stamford has paid out more than $258 million in the last four years, making it Connecticut’s luckiest town, Grimes said she thinks Norwalk might have an edge on the nearby city.
“A lot of people know that people won big here, and that’s probably why there’s always so many people playing here,” she said as she took a rest between tickets.
A moment later she was back to it, in hopes that she might be the next person to have her name tacked to the wall at One Stop.
maggie.gordon@scni.com; 203-964-2229; http://twitter.com/MagEGordon; http://facebook.com/TrendingWithMaggieGordon
Curious to know more? Check out this map, which shows how much money was won in each town during the four years analyzed.
