Truckers drive Super Bowl Sunday

On Sunday, friends and families will join together and huddle around a television while munching on a smorgasbord of chips, dip, pizza, chicken wings and popcorn and washing it down with a cold beer or soda. This can only mean one thing: Super Bowl Sunday!

Even if their team didn’t reach the championship game, millions of Americans will tune in to the most watched broadcast in the United States. In fact, the Super Bowl dominates broadcast viewership by a ridiculous landslide. Per Wikipedia:

The only broadcast in the top 20 that is NOT the Super Bowl is the M*A*S*H series finale in 1983. Over the past eight years, the big game has brought in more than 100 million viewers. Check out the most watched television broadcasts stats from last year alone:

Last year’s Super Bowl brought in more than twice as many viewers as the second most watched broadcast, which was also a NFL game (a divisional playoff). Seven of the 10 most watched television programs in 2017 were NFL games. Not even the inauguration of a president can draw in a third of what the Super Bowl generates.

And the food. What about the food?

According to the United States Department of Agriculture, Super Bowl Sunday is the second highest day of food consumption in the U.S. after Thanksgiving.

The good folks at Omnitracs have broken down some Super Bowl Sunday food stats that truckers can relate to. During the big game, Americans will:

• Drink 325 million gallons of beer (5 percent of the total yearly consumption in the U.S.). Turn that beer into fuel, and it could fill the tank of a semi 1.08 million times;
• Spend $227 million on potato chips, which would purchase 1,135 of Tesla’s founder series trucks;
• Buy $330 million worth of pizza, which could cover 4.7 million synthetic oil changes;
• Eat 8 million pounds of guacamole, which is equivalent to 100 fully loaded 18-wheelers;
• Consume 4 million pounds of pretzels, or the weight of 8,000 truck wheels;
• Devour 1.3 billion chicken wings, which could provide 371 wings to every class 8 driver in the country.

The Minnesota Trucking Association also released some Super Bowl Sunday stats for truckers. According to MTA, “Americans will consume over 100 truckloads of popcorn, 350 truckloads of potato chips, 668 truckloads of avocados, 1,562 truckloads of chicken wings, and over 36,166 truckloads of beer.”

MTA also pointed out that U.S. Bank Stadium in Minneapolis, the site of this year’s Super Bowl, was built using 11,000 truckloads of concrete, thousands of truckloads of dirt and thousands of truckloads of materials.

All these numbers and stats wrap around to the point I want to make:

Truckers drive Super Bowl Sunday.

Millions of pounds of food and millions of gallons of beverages do not magically appear in bars, stores and households. They arrive at these places because truckers delivered them.

In fact, Budweiser released one of its Super Bowl ads last week. The commercial is based on the company’s contribution to disaster relief efforts by highlighting the last-minute operations involved in distributing water. Towards the end, who is delivering and offloading the water? That’s right. A trucker.

One other Super Bowl Sunday facts related to the trucking industry: Sex trafficking surges in the city hosting the big game every year. This is due to the huge demand that comes from a flood of travelers in a concentrated area. I found that information from an organization that has recently been getting national mainstream media attention for its efforts in combating human trafficking: Truckers Against Trafficking.

Whether its delivering the food and drinks Super Bowl viewers crave, building the stadium the Super Bowl is played at or protecting trafficking victims in the city hosting the Super Bowl, it’s safe to say that Super Bowl Sunday would not be a fraction of what it is without truckers.