Mary Shammas, 73, was on the way home from a doctor’s appointment on the morning of May 25 when her left palm started to itch. The former Wall Street receptionist, who describes herself as “semi-superstitious,” decided it was a sign she simply couldn’t ignore — so she stopped at the 72 Lucky Lotto in Bay Ridge.
“I got off the bus and decided to buy a lottery ticket for that night’s Mega Millions drawing,” says the mother of four.
A few hours later, Shammas won a whopping $64 million — the third-biggest lottery windfall in New York City in the past 18 months. And the Bay Ridge bodega that sold Shammas her golden ticket has now joined a prestigious pantheon of the luckiest stores in the city.
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Across the five boroughs, 59 small grocery stores have sold lottery tickets worth $1 million or more in the past year and a half. (The biggest jackpot — $168 million — was sold by the Fordham Convenience and Grocery in The Bronx last August.)
The 72 Lucky Lotto store — the newest big-bucks bodega — looks the same as any other, save for a banner in the window that now proudly declares, “Mega Millions Jackpot Was Won Here.” Near the register sits a clear glass bowl with winning Pick Four and scratch-off tickets taped to it. So far, the biggest prize reaped by these cashed-in tickets is $600.
“Do I think this is a lucky store?” asks Iqbal Khan, the soft-spoken store clerk who sold Shammas the winning ticket. “Of course I believe in luck. Yes.”
(His enthusiasm is not surprising. Every store that sells a Mega Millions ticket lands a $10,000 bonus from the lottery regardless of the size of the jackpot.)
When it comes to the biggest jackpots, a Post lottery survey found that four shops are vying for the title of “New York’s Luckiest Bodega.” Three of them sold winning tickets in the 35-state Mega Millions jackpot in the past year.
“We believe very much in luck,” says Parsh Patel, a clerk at Fordham Convenience and Grocery, which sold the city’s — and the nation’s — biggest win of the past year to Harlem resident James “Jimmy” Groves. (In what one could argue is a bit of bad luck, Groves had to split the $336 million jackpot with Kevin Ogawa of California.)
“If you think about it, there are thousands of retailers [selling lottery tickets, and] every four or five weeks somebody wins, so there are around 10 or 15 people who win the jackpot. And we sold a winning ticket — that’s luck.”
In the five boroughs, only eight lottery retailers have sold more than one ticket worth $1 million since 2000. Of those, only one, Hylan Stationers, on Staten Island, has sold three: a $19 million lotto jackpot in 2005, a scratch-off ticket worth $3 million in June 2009 and, most recently, a $1 millon scratch-off jackpot last January. “We could be the luckiest in New York City,” says clerk Kuir Patel. “I don’t know if I believe in luck, but I was here when the $3 million was won.”
Another Big Bucks Bodega is Shiv Convenience in Jamaica, which sold a winning ticket last July worth a massive $133 million. Since then, the store has anointed several other big winners, including some Take Five jackpots ranging from $5,000 to $66,000. “We have so many winners, because each time we have a jackpot, we sell so many more tickets,” says owner Bharatkumar Tatel.
But others — who don’t stand to make bucks off the lottery — don’t believe in luck. “A lot of times, what we perceive as ‘luck’ is really just something that we don’t know or understand yet,” says Murray Woloshin, the president of FurrayLogic, a New York-based finance and technology consulting firm. “A mathematician or physicist will say there is no such thing as luck — quantum physics is based on the theory that the universe is built on randomness.”
And even Shiv owner Tatel admits he doesn’t bet on luck. “I never play the lottery,” he laughs. “If I had a habit like that, I’d have to close the store.”