18-year-old Lowe’s employee buys lottery ticket during stop for gas and hits jackpot

A teenager who stopped for gas in the North Carolina mountains made a “last-minute decision” to get a lottery ticket and won enough money to buy a small house.

Cody Plemmons, 18, of Arden has other plans for his winnings, according to an NC Lottery news release.

He works in the lumber department at a Lowe’s home improvement store, where average annual salaries are around $50,000.

Plemmons won about four times that, beating Cash Payout game odds of 1 in 1,208,892.

The win counted as only the third time Plemmons has risked buying a lottery ticket, he says. He got it at a BP gas station in Marshall, N.C., while “on a day trip to Tennessee,” officials said.

“We mainly stopped at the gas station for a drink and a snack,” Plemmons said in the release. “I honestly don’t even know why I got one. I just thought, ‘Why not’.”

The $5 Cash Payout ticket was worth $200,000, which is top prize in the game. He received $142,501 after paying the required federal and state withholdings, lottery officials said.

But don’t expect any splashy purchases — Plemmons says he’ll “put his winnings into savings.”

Cash Payout is a scratch-off game that launched in May with five $200,000 prizes, only one of which remains, according to the game. Lesser prizes range from $10,000 to $5.

This story was originally published January 4, 2023 at 1:09 PM with the headline "18-year-old Lowe’s employee buys lottery ticket during stop for gas and hits jackpot."