The auction of Washington's state liquor stores wound down Friday evening amid excitement and confusion, including heavy online traffic that may have thwarted some bidders.

"It's kind of a wild ride, seeing this whole process," said Rune Harkestad, a retail specialist at Kidder Mathews and a partner in a Tukwila strip mall that's home to one of the state's 167 liquor stores.

On June 1, those stores and about 160 others owned by entrepreneurs who have been under contract with the state will be the only exceptions to a new law that allows only grocery stores measuring 10,000 square feet or more to sell spirits. The new law results from voter-approved Initiative 1183, which privatizes liquor sales in the state.

The auction was for the rights to sell liquor at each of the 167 locations. The winners still must get liquor licenses, arrange lease agreements and buy inventory.

Harkestad and his partner gave up bidding earlier this week when the price of the store they were interested in topped $26,000, but they have not given up hope.

"My guess is there will be a great number of defaults come May 7," when winning bidders have to put up the money, he said.

He thinks some people shot higher than they could afford, "chasing the liquor dream."

As bids for each store ended following the 4 p.m. deadline, the results were pulled from the online auction site, making it difficult to identify the top bidders.

A steady stream of late bids kept the bidding open until nearly 6:30 p.m.

The state is set to formally announce winners Monday.

The last bid for getting the rights to all 167 stores as a group appears to have been $4,600,100 by a bidder called "darrensmith."

If that amount is accurate, it is well below the sum of bids for individual stores, which according to an Associated Press tally reached at least $27 million.

Richard Gates of Silverdale, Kitsap County, better known as Dumb Dick, said his repeated bids for the group were always intentionally below the sum of the individual bids. "I wanted my moment in the sun" with newspapers and TV calling, he said, adding his intention always was only to buy rights to two liquor stores.

He thinks he won the one in Shelton, but said the auction site became unreachable during his last-minute bidding for the second store, in Lacey, and it went to someone else.

Each individual auction closed following 5 minutes of inactivity after 4 p.m. — pushing some contests into the evening, with bidders continuing to up the ante every 5 minutes, assuming the site was reachable to them.

Pat McLaughlin, business-enterprise director at the Washington State Liquor Control Board, said the site did not crash. "It's been up the entire time, but there was a lot of bidder volume, so some might have trouble getting in," he said.

Melissa Allison: 206-464-3312 or mallison@seattletimes.com.

On Twitter @AllisonSeattle.