Business & Tech

$1 Million Acme Jackpot Won By Belmont Hills Man

Patch interviews Temple dental student Joseph Facciolo, whose trips to the Bala Cynwyd store put him on the right side of 48-million-to-1 odds.

On a Tuesday night in late July, Joseph Facciolo stopped at to pick up ingredients for pasta sauce.

The next night, on a whim, the 26-year-old Belmont Hills dental student at Temple University looked through the sweepstakes tickets he had collected all summer with his receipts from the store.

"I stood up and I said, 'Oh my God,'" Facciolo said. "I got away from the table, walked out of my apartment for a couple seconds, took a deep breath, and went to go figure out what had just happened."

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The night after that, he stood in front of the 's customer-service clerk. She looked at the six tickets he had brought.

"Don't go anywhere," she told him. "I have to call my manager."

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Moments later, Facciolo overheard: "I think the million-dollar prize just walked into the store."

How it happened

It took a few more phone calls and a week of verification from Acme headquarters, but the clerk was right: Facciolo had collected the correct set of game-piece tickets to win the $1 million grand prize, at odds of 48 million to one.

The Sizzlin' Summer Giveaway Collect and Win began May 18 and ends Thursday, Acme spokesman Steve Sylven said. Shoppers received collectible tickets at checkout, redeemable in certain combinations for prizes as small as free grocery items and as big (other than Facciolo's haul) as two $50,000 cash awards and two vehicles of the winner's choice.

Facciolo was shopping at the Bala Cynwyd store twice a month, usually Monday nights after working out at an East Falls gym. But on Monday, July 23, he said, his girlfriend persuaded him to skip the gym, so he skipped Acme, too, and went Tuesday night instead.

"It was truly a blessing in disguise," Facciolo told Patch in an interview Tuesday night.

He finally checked his stash of 20 or 25 tickets that Wednesday night, after making dinner. He saw the winning matchup.

"I must have counted through it 10 times," Facciolo said. "I got all frantic. I didn't know what to do. I still couldn't believe it. And then I went online to see what the due process was."

He didn't tell anyone at first. That Thursday night, he saw The Dark Knight Rises at with friends, then peeled off by himself to stop by the Penn Valley Acme before it closed.

When the store manager, summoned from home by the customer-service clerk, was on the phone with his manager, "it started to sink in a little bit," Facciolo said. "(The manager) said, 'I'm standing next to the happiest guy in the world right now.' It hadn't quite hit me until then."

Jackpot plans

Acme announced Facciolo's win Tuesday, Aug. 21, ahead of a scheduled check presentation at 10 a.m. Wednesday, Aug. 22, at the Bala Cynwyd store.

  • Editor's note: Don't forget to also see  of Joseph Facciolo getting his enormous $1 million check Wednesday morning.

To actually collect $1 million, Facciolo would have had to elect to receive $33,333.33 a year for 30 years.

Instead, he elected to take a lump-sum payment of about $550,000, of which—according to his financial advisor—about half will go to taxes, leaving him with about $275,000, Facciolo said.

So what does he plan to buy with that? Lottery dreamers may not like the answer.

"I would love to say 'a car' or 'a home'," Facciolo said. "But the loans that I've accumulated are really hefty. They're absolutely astounding."

The Wilmington native got his undergraduate degree at University of Delaware and has finished three of his four years in the doctorate program at the Maurice H. Kornberg School of Dentistry at Temple University. The debt from those programs will likely absorb the bulk, if not all, of his Acme winnings.

Of course, Facciolo knows that to eliminate a debt of that size, along with the prospect of years of formidable interest payments, is a stroke of tremendous luck.

"You hear of people winning these things, or Powerball or Mega Millions, but it doesn't normally happen where I'm from," Facciolo said.

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