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Imagine this: you have to return orange juice to the store and you leave $315 million richer.
It’s a hard thing to believe could happen to a person, but it’s exactly the situation Tayeb Souami found himself in.
It was May 19, 2018, when Souami’s wife asked him to take a carton of orange juice back to their local store, which he wasn’t to know would change his life forever.
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The husband did as he was instructed, and he became a millionaire overnight.
The father-of-two, who lived in New Jersey was an accountant for a food importer at the time, and he didn’t have a lot of money to spare.
The 56-year-old was doing what many people in his situation has to and he was budgeting their finances to save on costs.
Tayeb Souami won $315 million after returning orange juice (CBS New York)
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So, when he came home one day and showed his wife his latest purchase, she was adamant that it was ‘too expensive’ for the couple to splash out on.
The item? A $5 bottle of juice.
Because of their financial situation, his wife demanded that he take it back, and then he could shop around and find something cheaper for the couple to drink.
So, resigned, he hopped back into his car and traveled from Little Ferry to the ShopRite in Hackensack.
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It was there, in the line that his eyes were drawn to a commercial which showed the latest Powerball jackpot.
Why not try it out?
If he lost, it would just be another expense to tell his wife about.
But amazingly, he won.
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When the store worker refunded his orange juice, he used the money to buy two tickets for the lottery.
But oddly, he forgot all about his tickets and as he got home and into bed, fell asleep without checking his numbers.
The next day when he was at a carwash, he saw a 7-Eleven store and suddenly, it all came back to him.
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So, he marched in and scanned his papers by using the store’s lottery machines, and was defeated when the first ticket came up as a loser.
How would he explain to his wife that he’d wasted money on a losing ticket?
Thankfully, he didn’t have to as when he scanned the second ticket, the screen flashed with a message which read: “Must be seen by the retailer”.
Now, if anyone else saw that come up on the screen, they’d agree with the man in thinking that there was a problem with the ticket.
So, he took the ticket to the cashier, and that’s when the employee scanned the receipt and said: “Oh my god, oh my god.”
That’s when she broke the news to Souami, telling him that he’d won ‘big’, well, ‘very big’.
He’d only gone and become a millionaire (well, a 315 millionaire) within moments.
When news got out about his win, a press conference was held and he shared that he was going to pay for the education of his son and daughter, then aged 20 and 17.
He also joked: “I love orange juice now.”
We’d all love juice too if that happened to us.