Pizza Surcharges Increased For Super Bowl, Who Gets The Extra?

Every year the emphasis of the Super Bowl seems to be less and less about football, and more about the money.

Whether that is in multimillion dollar TV commercials, or something as basic as pizza, the media focus is shifting.

Now, even commercials that get dumped at the last minute are newsworthy – just ask Scarlett Johansson and Sodastream International!

And pizza joints all over the country will have their biggest sales day of the year. Domino’s alone is calculating on selling some 11 million slices to football fans, which in an increase of 80 percent over a typical Sunday.

The NFL’s “Official Pizza Sponsor,” Papa John’s, will have its brand prominently featured, with pitchman Peyton Manning doing the promoting.

Chrystal Banz, Pizza Hut general manager, says “We’ve been preparing for over a month, hiring and staffing our stores just for this one day. We want to have awesome service, so we’ve hired drivers, people who answer the phone, cooks, people who cut.”

Pizza Hut’s target is to sell over 2 million pizzas nationwide. So, 120,000 Pizza Hut employees will be working on Super Bowl Sunday to handle the 2.5 million calls and online orders.

Since so much of the pizza demand on this day is for home delivery, a huge volume of delivery fees is generated. The surcharges that pizza chains now add onto orders were first introduced about ten years ago. From a fairly modest start of 50 cents, the fees have now grown to between $1.50 and $3.00 per order.

All the big operators and their franchisees use them, including Domino’s, Papa John’s and Pizza Hut. The general assumption is that it’s the guys and girls delivering the pizzas who receive this money.

But, according to report in the Huffington Post, “It ain’t necessarily so!”

Whilst it’s true that delivery drivers get reimbursed for the cost using their cars, that reimbursement rate has nothing to do with the delivery fee. The other problem is that the words “delivery charge” are usually written on the bill, so customers feel, reasonably, that they don’t need to pay twice.

Apart from pizza, some one billion chicken wings are expected to be eaten nationwide.

Pluckers started the preparation about two weeks ago, and plan to sell around 12,000 wings at each of its locations.

The National Restaurant Association conducted a survey in 2012 which showed that 48 million Americans expected to order delivery on game day.

Surprisingly, pizza turned out NOT to be the most popular solo choice! It garnered a 61 percent score – but was pipped by chicken wings with 63 percent. But, since many people order both, the figures are a little misleading.

Oh! The game? That’s between the Seattle Seahawks and the Denver Broncos.

Whichever team wins, the real winners are the pizza chains.