Aug 10, 2016 3 min read

MT. MORRIS – BFS Foods Store on Locust Avenue in Mt. Morris is definitely the place to go to buy lottery tickets.

For the third time in the last 10 months, the store sold a lottery ticket that will bring its holder big bucks.

“I think we’re actually a lucky store,” store manager Tammy Wright said Wednesday morning. “Three in the last 10 months, that’s pretty good odds I’d say.”

The latest winning ticket sold at the store was for Tuesday’s drawing of the Pennsylvania Lottery’s Cash 5. One lucky person correctly matched all five numbers, 01-06-08-15-16, and won $325,000 before taxes, the lottery announced Wednesday.

The store also sold the winning ticket in the Feb. 20 Cash 5 drawing. It was one of two winning tickets sold for that drawing and netted the holder $112,500 before taxes.

The big bonanza, however, was the ticket the store sold for the Oct. 31 drawing of the lottery’s Halloween Millionaire Raffle. The ticket was one of four top-prize tickets for $1 million.

“We are a fairly decent lottery store,” Wright said, commenting on the store’s lottery sales but a statement equally applicable to its sale of winning tickets.

The store sells a lot of online lottery tickets and scratch-off tickets as well, Wright said. And, it has had its share of scratch-off winners.

Just a couple of weeks ago, a man bought a $3 scratch-off ticket at the store and won $1,000, she said.

Allen Ziegler, a spokesman for the lottery, said the sale of three winning tickets in 10 months by a store was not unusual, but he still couldn’t explain the Mt. Morris store’s luck.

“I’ve seen it happen before. It’s certainly not the most common thing, but definitely not uncommon,” Ziegler said. “There’s really no good explanation (for the number of winning tickets sold by one store) because it’s entirely random.”

No one at the store Wednesday morning knew who might have been the winner of Tuesday’s drawing, Wright said.

“All day, we’ve been asking pretty much everybody who comes in,” she said.

The store is at the Mt. Morris intersection of Interstate 79 and many of its customers are just jumping off the highway for gas.

“We see a lot of travelers, and there are a lot of people we don’t know,” Wright said. “But we also have a lot of local customers who come on a daily basis.”

The winners of the previous two tickets also have never been identified, although Wright said she was told those tickets have been claimed. She said a lottery representative told her earlier the $1 million winner was a person from West Virginia.

For selling the winning ticket, BFS will receive a $500 bonus from the lottery, according to release issued by the lottery announcing the winning ticket.

In light of the store’s record of selling winner tickets, Wright said, she also would probably ask the local lottery representative if he can throw in a few lottery T-shirts for the store’s employees.