Local pizza places prepare for Super Bowl crowd
As Super Bowl Sunday gets closer, it’s not just the New England Patriots, the Philadelphia Eagles and their super fans who are preparing. Businesses across the country also have to prepare for the big game, including three of Vermillion’s pizza places.
Domino’s, Pizza Hut and R-Pizza are beginning to prepare for the influx of customers and deliveries they might see on Feb. 4.
Zach Anderson, one of the managers at Domino’s, said it’s fun to see all of the employees coming together on busy days like the Super Bowl.
“Everyone is usually in a pretty good mood; they get to take a ton of deliveries,” he said. “Although some people don’t get to see the Super Bowl, we actually do play the Super Bowl in store so everybody gets to enjoy it.”
Anderson said pizza making is constant for about three hours before the game starts until an hour or two after halftime.
“We’re definitely getting ready for the Super Bowl coming up, and I think we’ll be able to really well handle what Vermillion’s got for us,” he said.
Prepping for the excitement
Domino’s, along with Pizza Hut and R-Pizza, make sure to have extra staff on hand to be able to handle the influx of customers and deliveries on Super Bowl Sunday. Many of those employees are USD students.
De Shonte Helm, a senior music education major, works at R-Pizza and said she plans on getting a lot of sleep to mentally prepare for the busy day of orders and deliveries.
“If it’s Super Bowl Sunday, it’s going to be busy,” she said.
Helm said she has only worked at R-Pizza for about six months so this will be her first Super Bowl there.
The pizza places also make sure to do extra prepping for the day. Brigit Flom, general manager at Pizza Hut, said there’s a plan that each employee receives to prepare for the day.
“We’ll do extra prep the night before and we’ll have extra staffing,” Flom said. “If everything works out, we’ll have the Super Bowl actually airing in the store this year and we’ll be decorating with some football theme to get our customers geared up as well as our staff.”
Flom said she’s new to Pizza Hut, but she’s looking forward to the excitement of the day.
“I’m excited and glad to see my first Super Bowl,” she said. “I’ve got a good team here and we work very well together.”
Although she wasn’t working the game last year, Flom was able to look at notes that said the store made about $950, which she said is good considering it’s a Sunday night.
“That’s been average for the past three years,” she said. “It’s very heavy between five and eight o’clock.”
Odd Choices
From odd green olive combinations, to pizzas with everything on them, the stores are also preparing for possible crazy requests from their customers.
Anderson said even though green olives are their least popular ingredient on the menu, they seem to see it pop up on busy days with all sorts of different combinations.
Brandon King, owner and manager of R-Pizza, said that although it isn’t specific to the Super Bowl, one of their crazier requests has been a “garbage pizza.”
“It’s a combination of everything on the meat supreme and everything on the veggie supreme, and then it also has shrimp on it,” King said. “It’s like 15 toppings or so.”
One thing all three pizza places want to emphasize to their customers is the importance of calling ahead on busy days like the Super Bowl, they said.
“If they give us advanced notice, we can deliver at a certain time if they’re planning they’re party or whatever,” King said. “Whereas if they wait until right before the game, that’s when everyone else is calling and it might take a little bit longer.”
