BLOOMINGTON — Minesh "Max" Patel watched during an early morning last December as one of his regular customers become a millionaire.
"She came in and said, 'Which one is a good one?'" recounted Patel, the owner of Franzetti's Pantry Plus near downtown Bloomington. "I said, 'Here try this one.'"
Within minutes of selling a $20 holiday scratch-off lottery ticket, Patel was validating that the ticket was a winner — for $1 million.Â
"The lady was just shaking ... and saying 'What do I do?'" Patel said. "I was like 'Oh my goodness' and said 'Calm down, you'll be fine.'"Â
Moments like that one last winter have been playing out inside of Patel's convenience store, located at the corner of East Washington and North Clinton Streets, since before he took ownership of the store in January 2020.
They're chronicled at the front counter, where a collection of posters featuring payouts, dates and winning games line a wall. Nearby sits the lottery display, offering 45 different tickets, ranging from $1 to $30 each to play.Â
The Bloomington business in 2020 had a gross sales total of $519,700 and sold 1,009 winning tickets, according to data obtained by The Pantagraph from the Illinois Lottery.Â
Those figures rank it second out of all 92 retailers in McLean County selling tickets.Â
No. 1 was the Qik-n-EZ gas station on Morrissey Drive, just off Veterans Parkway, in Bloomington, the data shows. The business logged $572,850 in total gross sales in 2020, having sold 1,058 winning tickets.Â
All told, McLean County's 92 lottery sellers pulled in $17.524 million in total sales, the data shows, with 36,607 winning tickets purchased by players.
Bloomington's 44 retailers recorded $10,369,350 in total gross sales, and sold 21,116 winning tickets. Normal's 24 retailers logged $4,090,450 in sales and sold 8,893 winning tickets.Â
"Quite frankly as a business you're not going to make a lot of money off the lottery," said Damon Cranford, chief operating officer of Chronister Oil Company, which owns the Qik-n-EZ convenience store chain.
Cranford said that because the lottery is "one of those things that people play or they don't play," businesses often draw economic benefits from it through ancillary sales of other products inside a gas station, like food and drink.
"We see it as something that the consumer wants and in providing that we can make them aware of other products that they may be interested in as well," said Cranford, who himself doesn't play the lottery.Â
Another local Qik-n-EZ gas station, located on East Vernon Avenue in Normal, tallied $237,250 in total gross sales and sold 489 winning tickets in 2020, ranking it 74th.
Cranford said it also makes sense for a business to offer the lottery because it can intersect with customers who also play video gambling.Â
"I think lottery on its own tends to appeal to same groups of people," Cranford said. "But they're also different — there are people who don't want to sit at gaming terminals, they want to scratch-off a ticket at home."
And because pandemic-inspired mitigations shut down video gaming terminals for four months in 2020, the continuation of lottery play and sales helped businesses, like those managed by Cranford, to stay afloat.
"The pandemic had a very direct effect on gambling overall," Cranford said. "Everybody in the industry saw tremendous declines in volume in everything. And even though the lottery business went up, it was not anywhere close to what we saw in losing gaming revenue."
For Patel, who does not offer video gaming, the revenue he generates from lottery sales and selling other products from his store matter that much more. Lottery transactions, he said, make up about 35% to 40% of his business.Â
Also at stake for him are relationships with his regular customers. Without those, Patel said, he doesn't think he would sell as many lottery tickets as he does.Â
"I see them as family and I treat them like family," Patel said. "That's the main thing. And if they keep winning, that's a good thing."Â Â
Patel also doesn't play the lottery. He said he prefers to cash-in on his customers' excitement when they share that a ticket he sold them was a winner.
"I like to sell the winning ticket," Patel said. "I like seeing that happiness with customers."Â
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Contact Timothy Eggert at (309) 820-3276. Follow him on Twitter: @TimothyMEggert
A sampling of Illinois Lottery winning tickets is displayed by Minesh "Max" Patel's Franzetti's Pantry Plus, 801 E. Washington St., Bloomington. Patel's convenience store is the second ranked store in the area for lottery ticket sales.