Woman finds winning lotto ticket in surprising place
Employees at deli in the US took customer service very seriously when they sifted through a skip bin full of rubbish to recover a winning lottery ticket a customer had left there.
Mary Peabody went to the Lucky Spot deli in Southeast Portland to redeem her prize, but learned she’d have to go to the Oregon Lottery office because her win exceeded $600, according to a news release shared with Yahoo Lifestyle.
Mary left the deli but accidentally left her ticket behind and grabbed the congratulatory receipt instead. Mary didn’t realise the major misstep until the next day - when she also remembered she hadn’t signed the ticket, meaning anyone who found it would be able to claim the $1,730 (USD $1,200) prize.
"By law, Lottery tickets belong to the person who signs the back of the ticket," explained the Oregon Lottery, "which is why the Oregon Lottery always urges people to sign the back of their tickets as soon as possible."
Mary raced to Lucky Spot the next day in hopes that the staff had found her winning ticket and put it aside for safekeeping - but no such luck.
“The clerk was really upset that the ticket was lost,” Mary said in the release. “At that point, we thought we had lost $1,200.” Disappointed, she went home and wrote off the prize.
But the manager of Lucky Spot, Dena Thompson, wasn’t going to give up that easily. The ticket might have landed in the garbage, she figured, and luckily the skip hadn’t been emptied yet. So she and other deli employees - along with some friends - decided it was time to get their hands dirty.
After rifling through “six different large bags of garbage,” someone spotted the winning ticket - and it was clean and intact. “I couldn’t help thinking that this was crazy, we found it!” said Dena.
Then the manager had to wait for Mary to come back to the deli because she didn’t have the woman’s contact information. But a few days later she did return, and she was shocked to have the ticket handed to her in an emotional reunion with Dena.
“You don’t expect people to do that for you,” Mary said. “[Dena] was almost in tears when she told me they found the ticket.” And the lottery winner wasn’t about to take any chances. “The first thing we did was sign it!” she said.
Words by Kristine Solomon.
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