Super Bowl Sunday. The party spreads soon will be laid out and fans will get down to the serious business of rooting for their favorite teams. Will it be the Denver Broncos or the Carolina Panthers? One thing that’s for sure pre-game is that today is a boon for businesses. The National Retail Federation’s Super Bowl Spending Survey indicates stores that sell food, drink, team apparel and home electronics will rake in $15.5 billion, an 8.3 percent spike over last year. The study conducted with Prosper Insights and Analytics found that on average, partygoers and viewers are expected to spend $82.19 apiece. Last year, they spent $77.88 each.
Store displays and advertising are strong indicators of how people will spend their piece of the multi-million pie. I walked into a local grocery store last week and was met by a wall of beer, processed cheese and green chili tomatoes. Other displays beckoned me to purchase wings, tortilla chips and other goodies.
One research group reported beer sales the week prior to today’s big game were expected to be $583 million, the largest sales for any game day product. Cheese should bring in $277 million in sales. Natural cheese accounts for the majority of cheese sales during the week leading up to the Super Bowl, but cream cheese and processed cheese have the biggest sales boost from the game. Last year, these categories saw sales spikes of 30 percent and 19 percent, respectively, as a result of pre-game preparations. In comparison, natural cheese sales grew 10 percent. That’s a lot of dip and cheese balls.
Another statistic many will sink their teeth into is wings. The National Chicken Council says about four wings for every person will be consumed this weekend. That’s more than 1.3 billion wings, a demand NCC says is up 3 percent, or 37.5 million wings, from last year’s game.
At our house, we must factor in kibbles. I stopped in at Pet Sense last week for a fresh bag of Blue Buffalo and some dental chews. I don’t have any statistics to offer on dog treats sales, but I can tell you this for a fact – the Puppy Bowl is a big event at our house. It’s what we watch when the Super Bowl commercials aren’t on.
You can tune in this afternoon to Animal Planet for tailgating and Puppy Bowl XII. The participants in this year’s bowl came from shelters around the country. Some of the locations include the Arizona Human Society, Florida Little Dog Rescue, Nevada SPCA and Stella’s Hope. Forty-four different shelters and rescue organizations helped to provide dogs for the game in hopes that the exposure would find them forever homes.
The Wilson household has checked out the line ups for Team Ruff and Team Fluff and honed in on three Bulldogs. We’ll be rooting for Otis, Contessa and Puddin Pop.
Animal Planet has also set up a way for people to create fantasy teams. Each team owner gets to select three puppies that they will be rooting for during the big game. Animal Planet has even provided a scorecard to keep track of the touchdowns, field goals, takeaways, tackles and penalties that each puppy might achieve during the day. I’m not sure we’ll take it that far but if he we do, we have our three dogs picked out.
Have a super Sunday and good luck to your team, whether its players have two legs or four.
(Shea Wilson is the former managing editor of the News-Times. Email her at [email protected]. Follow her on Twitter.com @sheawilson7).