This year’s Super Bowl not only shook up expert predictions with an underdog victory, but also shook up restaurant and bar sales nationally and in both teams’ home cities. Like last year, national delivery and to-go sales once again dominated compared to the last 4 Sundays leading up to Super Bowl Sunday. Fans opted to stay home and order in from their favorite spots, driving up delivery and to-go sales by 11.6%. Similarly, this preference for staying in led to national restaurant dining room sales to decrease by 19.4%. Bars, however, saw an increase of 20.2% in sales! It seems that for fans who chose to leave the comfort of their homes, they opted to visit their local watering hole.
Looking at sales in each team’s respective home cities, it comes at no surprise that rowdy Eagles fans took to the local bars to celebrate their improbable victory. Eagles fans set out to bars to seriously push sales to increase 68.6%, as they readied themselves to flip cars and try their luck on greased poles.
Caleb Gibson, General Manager of Alma De Cuba in Philadelphia, one of the restaurants belonging to Starr Restaurants, notes that because the Eagles were in this year’s super bowl, more Philadelphia locals opted to leave the comforts of their homes to watch the games: “[Philly residents] were more inclined to go out because the city was actually involved and they wanted to have that sense of camaraderie instead of being home with just a few people.”
Like the Patriots, Boston restaurants and bars also came home with a loss this Super Bowl Sunday. Compared to last Super Bowl when the Patriots came out with a last-minute win, their loss this year led to a decrease of 15.3% in restaurant and bar sales.
Nationally, however, restaurants and bars fared better during Super Bowl LII than during last year’s game. Perhaps the fact that fewer fans tuned in to this year’s game meant that more Americans spent the night enjoying a meal rather than watching the game. Or, perhaps the nation as a whole joined in the revelry of the wild Eagles fans to celebrate finally slowing down Tom Brady’s strong reign of success.
Looking further into restaurant trends during the big game, we examined how some of the local signature item sales fared across the country. While the National Chicken Council reported that Americans would eat 1.35 billion wings during the Super Bowl, we wanted to know how the game affected sales of Philly Cheese Steaks and the New England classic, Sam Adams beer. Looking at the change in quantity sold of cheese steaks and Sam Adams, it seems New England finally has a victory with a 6.9% increase in Sam Adams sales, while sales of the famous sandwich only increased by 3.2%. 
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