Local man David Smolenski has done it again and sold yet another jackpot winning Lotto ticket from his Queen Street branch of Night n Day. Dubbed the second luckiest store in New Zealand due to the sheer amount of winning tickets bought there, the first division winner walked away with a staggering $500,000. “We probably won’t ever really know who won,” says David. “We hope it’s a local, but it could be someone who was just passing through. Either way, we wish them all the best.”
Coincidently, he also sold a winning second division ticket last week too, and that winner scooped over $30,000. “My family have been running this shop for 28 years,” says David. “And we’ve sold 36 first division winning tickets for Lotto, Powerball, Strike and Big Wednesday, as well as more than 200 second division winners.” Over the years, the store’s winning tickets amount to over $18 million in prizes.
Never hitting the jackpot himself, David revealed that the biggest win he has ever had was for $3,000 and he treated his family to a holiday with the proceeds. “I still buy a weekly ticket,” he says. “Because we are the luckiest store in the South Island, it could be us next!”
The country’s luckiest store is the North Island’s Unichem Stortford Lodge Pharmacy in Hastings.