Powerball ticket sales broken down

By Ana Bottary

abottary@abc6.com

@anabottary

Rhode Island’s 1,200 Powerball retailers have been busy this week with the jackpot, which is now up to $1.5 billion. The Rhode Island Lottery says sales in the state are up four times from what they were last Wednesday. Kenneth Khory, owner of City Liquors in Providence, gave ABC6 some insight as to how the lottery collects the money from the stores.
 
"It’s done electronically. Every week the lottery sweeps everyone’s account in the state on a weekly basis," says Khory.
 
He says he requests a summary from the lottery machine, it lists how much money is in scratch tickets and each lottery game made that week, and that is how much they deduct from the account. Rhode Island Lottery says each store gets eight percent commission on each ticket sold. If the winner of the jackpot is from Rhode Island, RI Lottery spokesperson, Melissa Juhnowski, says the state will benefit big time as well, about 55.7 million dollars to be exact.
 
"There is the tax benefit that we would get, if there is a winner in the state of Rhode Island, 5.99 percent," says Juhnowski.
 
Including Rhode Island, 47 states offer Powerball. The multi-state lottery association who runs Powerball says that since the game began in 1992, their total sales come to more than 55-billion dollars. In that time, winners have taken home more than 28-billion, a little over half of the money Powerball itself has made as for the rest of it. According to MUSL, all profits from the games are kept by the state that sells the ticket. With that being said, the state must pay for expenses, such as advertising and salaries for lottery commission workers, before counting the funds as profit.

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