People flood mini marts for Powerball lottery tickets; Saturday’s drawing over $800 million

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KETTERING — One lucky person could wrap up the weekend with over $800 million by winning Saturday’s Powerball.

>>PHOTOS: People flood mini marts for Powerball lottery tickets

News Center 7′s Taylor Robertson wanted to find out Saturday night just how much money that is.

She said with the estimated jackpot up to an estimated $875 million, the cash value would be a little over $450 million.

To put that in perspective, Robertson says it’s enough to purchase 4,000 average-priced homes in Dayton.

“Wow, that’s insane,” said Michael Sharon of Centerville.

The winner of Saturday’s jackpot could afford to pay the salary of almost 2,000 Dayton-area workers for an entire year. They could also buy the Dayton Dragons baseball team ten times.

“Oh, wow. Definitely not doing that,” said Sharon.

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Robertson reports that amount could also get you almost 10,000 new cars in Ohio or around 45,000 acres of land.

“Oh, that would be perfect,” said Sharon. “Ginormous house, big pool, a racetrack in the back probably, shooting range, something like that.”

Despite his small chance of winning, Robertson says he is still dreaming of what would do with that money.

“I’d probably take a year off and travel the world,” Sharon said. “(I would) see Greece and Romania and Ireland.”

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Robertson says several people are hoping to win big. She was at Bee-Gee’s Market on Saturday and saw people flood into the store to buy their tickets.

“Lottery stays busy all the time at Bee-Gee’s Market,” said Michael Sliger, manager. “But when the jackpot gets this big, it gets even bigger and even busier. We get a lot of folks coming in looking for their chance to win.”

Robertson reports those odds are 1 in 292 million.

“It’s not a great chance, but you know, for $2, it’s worth a dream and a conversation,” said Sliger. “It’s always fun to take a chance.”

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He adds there is still hope and has seen multiple people win big from a ticket they bought at Bee-Gee’s.

“Up on the wall, there are two different $1 million winner signs, a year ago we had an $819,000 winner,” Sliger told Robertson. “We just recently had another $82,000 winner, we get $1,000, $5,000, $10,000 on a regular basis. We get a lot of winners.”

If there are no winners, the next Powerball drawing will be Monday night.