$1 billion lottery prize ticket was sold in Michigan

The winning ticket for a $1 billion jackpot, the third-biggest lottery prize in US history, was sold at a Michigan grocery store, according to state lottery officials.

The winning numbers, which were drawn Friday night, were picked by a customer at a Kroger grocery store in Novi, a city of about 60,000 people, 30 miles northwest of Detroit.

State lottery officials said the identity of the winner will not be known until the person contacts them.

The winner can choose to collect the prize through an initial payment and then annual payments for 29 years, or receive a one-time cash payment of about $739 million. In that case, the winner would get about $530 million, after taxes, state lottery officials said.

The odds of winning the jackpot were 1 in 302,575,350, according to Mega Millions. The winning numbers in the Mega Millions lottery were 4, 26, 42, 50 and 60, with a Mega Ball number of 24.

Two days earlier, a separate $731 million Powerball jackpot hit. That winning ticket was sold at Coney Market, a convenience store in the down-on-its-luck former mining town of Lonaconing in northwest Maryland.

A spokesperson for Kroger congratulated the winner and the mayor of Novi, Bob Gatt, said he was “ecstatic” for the winner. “I’d be better if I had the winning ticket,” he said.

The jackpot was the second-largest prize in the history of Mega Millions.

In 2018, a person who chose to remain anonymous won $1.537 billion in South Carolina. That prize remains the world’s largest lottery prize ever awarded on a single ticket, according to Mega Millions.

A lingering mythology holds that the winners of big jackpots become cursed after their strokes of good fortune. There are numerous accounts of winners who, unequipped to manage their newfound wealth, go on to struggle with drugs or alcohol, ruined relationships and insolvency.

While one influential study in 1978 found that lottery winners were not any happier than their neighbors or more optimistic about the future, other studies have countered the notion of the so-called lottery curse.

The studies suggest that the winners’ general psychological well-being bounces back over time.