Where to buy Powerball tickets close to Utah in Idaho, Wyoming
Emily Burnett marks her numbers at the Eagle Market Store as she prepares to buy Powerball lottery tickets in Los Angeles, Saturday, Jan. 9, 2016. Ticket sales for the multi-state Powerball lottery soared Saturday as people dreamed of winning the largest jackpot in U.S. history which grew by $100 million to hit $900 million just hours before Saturday night's drawing. (AP Photo/Gus Ruelas)
Got your Powerball tickets yet? It’s not too late. If you want to make a last-ditch stab at the $1.5 billion jackpot up for grabs in the drawing Wednesday night, here are the closest ticket outlets from the Ogden area:
La Tienda market
2 South State St., Franklin, Idaho, 208 646-2402
Distance and drive time from Ogden: 67.8 miles, 1 hour and 15 minutes.
Pilot Flying J
1920 Harrison Drive, Evanston, Wyoming, 307 789-9129
Distance and drive time from Ogden: 77.7 miles, 1 hour and 13 minutes.
“It’s crazy, crazy,” Ashly Edlesen, a cashier at Pilot Flying J in Evanston, Wyoming said in a phone interview Tuesday. “There’s a line, a two-hour wait. It gets worse in the evenings.”
Edelsen, excitement in her voice, said the truck stop has been selling tens of thousands of Powerball tickets a day since the jackpot got huge.
“People buy anywhere from $10 to $700 in tickets,” she said. “Most of them are from Utah.”
With gambling illegal in Utah, people along the Wasatch Front with a hankering for the lottery must head out of state, usually to Evanston or to Franklin, Idaho, a few miles north of Logan over the Utah-Idaho line.
“We have a half-hour wait, we have five registers going and the parking lot is overflowing,” said K.C. Spackman, owner of La Tienda in Franklin.
Spackman didn’t sound especially excited or flustered by the surge in business, probably because he’s been cornering a big chunk of the pent-up Utah lottery demand for decades.
“I’ve been doing this for 22 years,” he said by phone Tuesday. “We kind of have fun with it.”
Spackman said he calls in family members to help staff the store during Powerball binges.
With the lottery drawing day nigh, he said, “Tomorrow is a national holiday. It’s lottery fever.”
The retailer said his store has been selling 100,000 lottery tickets a day and serves 300 to 400 people per hour.
Are most of the buyers from Utah? “Ninety-nine-point-nine percent,” he said.
According to Money Magazine, six states do not have lotteries: Alabama, Alaska, Hawaii, Mississippi, Nevada, and Utah. So Utahns who go to Wendover, Nevada, to gamble, can’t get Powerball tickets there.
