The Tennessee Lottery got off to a "gangbusters" start in Knoxville on Tuesday after a 12:01 a.m. kickoff, with hundreds lining up for tickets and the city reporting one of the state's largest winners.
"It has been one of the quickest (lottery starts in the nation) for sure," said Kym Gerlock, spokeswoman for the Tennessee Lottery organization. "I'm hearing a lot of excitement coming out of Knoxville."
State Sen. Steve Cohen, a Memphis Democrat who championed the lottery for two decades, said the first day of sales was an answer to lottery opponents.
"From all I can tell, it's going great gangbusters," he said. "People are playing all over Tennessee. I think the naysayers are drowning out as the minutes pass."
But state Sen. Ben Atchley, R-Knoxville, a lottery critic, was unimpressed.
"I expected it to get up to a fast start," he said. "I still feel the same. That's exactly the wrong way for the government to be raising money."
As of press time, Gerlock couldn't provide the number of lottery tickets sold, official winnings or the amount of revenue collected. But Gerlock said "there have been reports" of four $1,000 winners, one $5,000 winner and one $7,000 winner in Knoxville. The official tally should come out sometime Wednesday.
The other $7,000 winner was reported from Memphis.
Of the nearly 3,500 Tennessee retailers where roughly 47 million lottery tickets were distributed, only about 4 percent had "minor issues" such as not receiving tickets or the tickets going to the wrong address, Gerlock said.
One vendor who had trouble her first day was Randa Halloun, who owns 17th Street Market & Deli. She said ticket sales at her store were slower than expected.
Her store didn't receive banners advertising the tickets and tickets arrived the day sales started, complicating efforts to work out kinks, she said.
"I think they rushed it," she said.
Halloun was only able to sell her $2 tickets. She couldn't activate her $1 tickets because an invoice did not come with their box. She was hesitant to start selling the $5 tickets.
Calls to the helpline for ticket vendors went unanswered, she said.
Halloun said general traffic at her store was about normal, but at the Pilot station at 136 N. Northshore Drive, general manager Steve Bourne said customer volume was "definitely" heavier than normal.
By around 9 a.m. the store usually has had about 90 customers, Bourne said. By that time Tuesday around 600 had showed up, and the store had given out $115 in winnings, he said.
"I'm expecting a lot of people to pop back in here after work," Bourne said. "I wonder how many people were late to work and said, 'Sorry. I had to pick up a lottery ticket' "
Bourne would only say Tuesday that "thousands" of tickets had been sold.
Earnings from the lottery are set to fund higher-education scholarships, although students who have entered before 2004 aren't eligible.
Chris Haynes, a 21-year-old University of Tennessee junior, bought several lottery tickets for himself and his roommates at Halloun's market yesterday, and he said he would have liked to have been helped by the lottery.
"I think it's really good," Haynes said. "If I'd have had this when I graduated from high school, I'd be getting a lot of money, which I wish I'd have had."
Some reports have said the state stands to pull in around $900 million through the lottery in a year, but that's a "very rough" estimate, Gerlock said.
"We don't know anything definitive yet," she said.
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