Lottery hopefuls keep Sidney outlets hopping

As the jackpot for Tuesday night's Mega Millions drawing rocketed past the $600 million mark, clerks at local outlets struggled to keep up with demand.

"They're going pretty quick," said Billy Steele at Western Convenience. "It's always this busy when the jackpot gets this high."

By mid-morning on Tuesday, lottery officials bumped the estimated payoff up to $636 million, the second largest amount in U.S. history and nearing the $656 Mega Millions figure from March of 2012.

As a result, explained Rebecca Callahan at the Git 'n Split location on 10th Avenue, "we probably sold more yesterday than in a normal three or four day period."

She anticipated an even greater volume of sales Tuesday afternoon.

The odds of anyone from the local area are slim--somewhere in the 1 in 259 million range--but that did not stop people crowding into convenience stores during breaks in their workday.

"You should have been here two hours ago," Amber Bassett said during a quiet spell at the Git 'n Split on Illinois. "It was constant."

She observed many more people than usual purchasing multiple numbers in hopes of increasing their luck.

"People don't really understand the probabilities at all," professor George Loewenstein of Carnegie Mellon University's economics department told the Associated Press. "Once you have a bunch of zeroes, it doesn't matter how many your have--one in 10,000, one in a million or one in a billion."

Yet as this frenzy continued on Tuesday, Gov. Dave Heineman presented the award for a winning $122 million Powerball ticket from last week's drawing to David and Erica Harrig of Gretna.

The couple split the jackpot with a winning ticket from Massachusetts.

Should the Mega Millions jackpot hold to estimates, the cash option would pay $341 million, not including taxes. If no winning number is selected, Friday night's drawing could approach $1 billion.