He Was Waiting for This Day to Come. And… Threw Away Winning Lottery Tickets in the Garbage. WTF!?

OMG! $1.25 Million Straight to the Garbage!

Maybe you’ve heard the news about a Pennsylvania man who threw away $1.25 million worth of lottery tickets in the garbage. If not, let me enlighten you.

This guy, we’ll call him Pissed Pete, goes to the usual spot to get lottery tickets, Zhou Grocery on South Queen Street in York, Penn. He has a daily routine of buying $100 worth of lottery tickets (about 20 to 25 tickets with other lottery purchases) using the same numbers every day.

Well, one day he misreads the tickets and throws them away. It would turn out that those tickets were winners! Every single one of those tickets was worth $50,000 which totaled to $1.25 million! Straight to the garbage.

Costly Mistake

As you can guess, Pissed Pete was pretty pissed. The store clerk, Wendy Hinton, said that he was so mad that he spent $400 on the lottery that day (stupid).

No one knows what happened to the tickets because the Pennsylvania Lottery put out a news release in February of this year stating that whoever had the winning tickets, they had until March 13th to claim the prize.

Unless Oscar the Grouch was going to claim them, that money never going to get claimed. He could have upgraded from that trash can and moved into a landfill with that kind of money.

As you can imagine, no one has claimed the prize, and the money will remain in the Lottery Fund.

WTF Moments Abound

I have to wonder what was going on in Pissed Pete’s day for him to misread the numbers on his tickets. He plays the same numbers every day. If you’re watching the lottery broadcast on television, they are pretty slow when they draw. Not only that, but they also say the numbers and they repeat them and show them at the end of the broadcast! Where is the misreading coming from?

Even if you read the numbers from the newspaper, for ordinary people, if you read the lottery numbers and they are even remotely close to what you always play, wouldn’t you check, double check, and maybe even triple check? Perhaps I’m just one of those overly cautious types with OCD tendencies, but where there is money to be won, you can be damned sure that I’m going to be vigilant with my numbers!

Wasting $100 a Day

Another thing that ruffles my feathers is that this guy is playing the lottery and wasting (allegedly) $100 a day. Yeah, it’s his money to do with what he wants, but come on! Pissed Pete is throwing away $700 a week on lottery tickets. Let’s do the math to see how long it would take for him save $1.25 million if he would stop spending that kind of loot every day.

7 x 100 = $700 a week

4 x 700 = $2,800 a month

12 x $2,800 = $33,600 a year

1,250,000/33,600 = 37.2 years

…Okay. So it would take a while, but still. $700 is a lot of money to spend on the lottery. It makes me wonder what Pissed Pete does for a living. It has to be something perfect to be able to spend $5,000 less than the average family earns in Mississippi. Ridiculous!