Pair of big lottery wins makes SC store a hotspot. ‘Customers are happy, very happy’

Winning lottery tickets have become good — very good — for business at one South Carolina convenience store.

Two winning scratch-off lottery tickets were sold a couple weeks apart at Paras Point in Taylors, according to a Sept. 29 South Carolina Lottery news release.

The first winner took home $1 million, while another won $300,000 about two weeks later.

Because of the two big winners, more people have been coming to the store to buy lottery tickets, husband-and-wife owners Ashok and Shila Patel said in the release. They’ve worked at Paras Point for seven years, they said, but the recent wins are the first big prizes they’ve seen.

“I’m feeling good and the customers are happy, very happy,” Ashok Patel said in the release.

The first winner, who took home his lucky ticket in late August, couldn’t believe his eyes when he saw he won $1 million, he said in the release. It kept him up all night, he said.

“I’m still working every day,” the man said in the release. “But it’s a life changer for sure.”

The second winner also took his ticket home to scratch, lottery officials says. He just sat there when he saw the prize amount, he said in the release.

Now, he says he can become debt-free and still have “plenty left over for savings,” the release says.

Taylors is about 95 miles southwest of Charlotte, North Carolina.

This story was originally published September 29, 2023 at 1:54 PM with the headline "Pair of big lottery wins makes SC store a hotspot. ‘Customers are happy, very happy’."

Makiya Seminera

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Makiya Seminera is a national real-time reporter for McClatchy News. She graduated from the University of Florida in May 2023. She previously was a politics reporting intern at The News & Observer in Raleigh, North Carolina, and The State in Columbia, South Carolina. She also served as editor-in-chief of UF’s student-run newspaper The Independent Florida Alligator in 2022.