The Super Bowl: Pizza’s biggest payday of the year
Super Bowl Sunday is about the big game, sure. But it’s also about the grub. Chips, dip, hot wings, and of course, pizza. Domino’s Pizza alone expects to sell more than 11 million slices on game day, and says its delivery guys will cover the equivalent of 300 roundtrips between San Francisco and Baltimore. To see how a company gears up for the Super Bowl of pizza eating, I dropped by a Domino’s outlet in Culver City, Calif., where I met franchise owner Dan Hosseini. In a normal day, Hosseini makes about 100-200 pizzas.
“Towards the end of the week, we tend to sell more. Our stores range anywhere from say 400 to about 500, 600 pizzas per day,” says Hosseini. “Super Bowl is also Super Bowl for us. We tend to get much busier than average. Usually we do maybe anywhere from twice to three times the normal volume on Super Bowl Sunday.”
That adds up to anywhere from 400-1,200 orders. That’s a whole lot of pepperoni. And a whole lot of hands on deck. Hosseini says “we’ve got the entire staff working, prepping from early in the morning, getting ready for the business. All the folks that are working inside the store, the entire driving staff are scheduled to work. We’re really working literally from 8 o’clock in the morning prepping all the way to midnight, 1 o’clock just to manage the business.”
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One of Hosseini’s drivers, Michael Walker, worked Super Bowl Sunday last year. He says it took him on average about 30 minutes to get customers their pizza during game day. His suggestion for those of you planning to order pizza this Sunday? A 20 percent tip.
“That would be really nice, of course, depending on the size of the order. But that would be a very generous tip,” says Walker.
Another tip for those of you planning for pizza? Get your order in before halftime.
“Usually during halftime, we get ready to get rocked. We get all lines coming in. And now with our online apparatus, the floodgates are open. So we get down 40, 50, 60, 70 pizzas in a matter of a minute or two,” says Hosseini. “During halftime we do really well. If the game is close, like this one will be — 28-24 49ers, that’s my prediction — I think we’ll do really well.”
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