No matter what the outcome of tonight’s Powerball drawing, Butler County businesses will consider themselves winners.

Tonight’s $500 million Powerball payout, already a record-setter, could exceed that amount by the time the lucky numbers are drawn.

Since being introduced to Ohioans in April 2010, the Powerball lottery has earned nearly $296 million in Ohio and $9.3 million in Butler County, which ranks 10th out of Ohio’s 88 counties in 2012 with year-to-date sales of $4.3 million through Monday, according to the Ohio Lottery Commission.

Sales of Powerball and other lottery tickets help merchant’s bottom lines. Businesses are paid a blended rate of 6.2 percent for commissions and bonuses on all lottery sales in Ohio.

Dixie Delicatessen, 6687 Dixie Highway, is Butler County’s top seller of Powerball tickets, with year-to-date sales of $121,858 through Monday, according to the lottery commission.

“Anything that brings people in your store helps you sell other things,” said Harold Maggard, the deli’s owner. “It builds traffic and if enough of them come through, if you get five of them, probably one of them will buy something.

Maggard said the Powerball and other lottery options help his business a great deal, providing a minor boost for sales of in-store items and a major boost to sales of other lottery items, such as scratch-off tickets.

“Very few people come in and just buy the Powerball (alone),” he said.

Dixie Delicatessen enjoyed a brisk business in lottery tickets Tuesday, especially once customers learned the potential Powerball payout had increased from $425 million to $500 million.

“It’s not as equal to that one big one (a $656 Mega Million drawing back in March) but they still wait until the last day to buy them,” Maggard said. “We’ve had ‘em coming in to buy them for $2 to $500. That was the biggest sale we had today but we’ve had ‘em for a lot more than that (in the past).”

Lottery sales also were strong Tuesday afternoon at Broadway News on South Main Street in Middletown, and they’re expected to be even greater today, said Stephanie Jones, a sales woman at the business.

She said sales overall in the store are up because of the number of people purchasing lottery tickets.

Jones also has seen first-time lottery players, what she called “newbies,” in the store since the jackpot has grown in size.

“Everybody just wants to win,” said Jones, who added she’s a little surprised by the sales considering it’s the end of the month.

Richard Arnold, 70, of Middletown, said he buys a few dollars of lottery tickets every week, regardless of the size of the jackpot. When asked what he’d do with the money if he won, he said: “There would be enough people with their hands outs.”

Tom Mehl, whose brother, Bill Mehl owns Broadway News, said he rarely buys a lottery ticket, but decided to try his luck this week because of “all the hype.”

The increase in sales for Powerball tickets can likely be linked to the rise in ticket prices. In January, the cost of a single Powerball ticket went from $1 to $2.

“But along with that they enhanced some of the prizes,” said Ohio Lottery spokeswoman Marie Kilbane. “The overall odds became a little bit better and the second-tier prize, matching all the numbers without Powerball went from $200,000 to $1 million, and they moved the starting jackpot from $20 million to $40 million.”

If an Ohio business sells the winning Powerball ticket this time around, it could earn the contest’s maximum payout of $100,000, Kilbane said.

Chuck Strutt, executive director of Multi-State Lottery Association, said sales largely stayed flat during the peak of the recession in 2008 and 2009, but have picked up since.

“Our biggest factor is gas prices,” he said. “If people go to a gas station and put 80 bucks of gas in their car, they’re not feeling happy to buy a lottery ticket.”

Strutt is estimating that there will be $214 million in sales for Wednesday’s drawing, up from $140 million from Saturday’s drawing.