Phoenix, AZ — The Arizona Lottery says it’s currently doing about $1,700 in Powerball sales per minute.
With an estimated jackpot of $1.5 billion comes some kooky side effects.
“It’s been crazy’ people are not buying one and two, they’re buying by the hundreds,” Steve Delly, a partner at the Shell Gas Station on the corner of Seventh Street and Maryland Avenue in Phoenix, said.
He says on Tuesday alone he sold more than 2,000 tickets, and then noticed he was running low on the paper the lottery provides to print them.
“I usually go through about a roll a week, but the way things are going I must have changed three rolls in the last 24 hours between both of my machines,” he said.
“The Arizona Lottery is working closely with IGT, its vendor that monitors ticket stock supply and handles delivery of ticket paper stock,” a spokesman for the Arizona Lottery wrote in an email. “IGT constantly monitors the paper supply at the retailers and is replenishing supplies as needed to prevent retailers from running out of paper.”
Delly was told Tuesday that IGT would try to get more ticket paper to him as soon as possible.
As of 10 p.m. Tuesday, it hadn’t happened, but he’s confident that the company will get him more paper before he runs out.
