Heinz Wants to Make the Day After the Super Bowl a National Holiday The ketchup maker wants to take the suggestion to the the House and the Senate.
By Nina Zipkin •
Last year, 111.9 million people watched Super Bowl 50.
Whether you were deeply invested in the fates of the Denver Broncos and Carolina Panthers or you were mostly interested in the food and Beyonce's halftime show -- it still amounted to the third most watched broadcast in television history. And the Kraft Heinz company is betting that means there were a fair amount of people who would have been fine not going into the office the next day.
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The maker of Heinz ketchup has proposed making the Monday after the Super Bowl a national holiday. Altruistic though it may seem, the company is almost certainly hoping that the campaign will inspire football fans to bring on the post-game food comas with the help of its stable of products.
The company came up with the mildly unwieldy name of Smunday, and have created a Change.org petition to be sent to Congress and the Senate if it reaches 100,000 signatures. So far the count is hovering around 30,000.
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Aiming to appeal to people's sense of both productivity and patriotism, Heinz cited a statistic that more than 16 million people call in sick or simply don't go to the work the day after the Super Bowl, leading to an annual loss of $1 billion.
"If we can make Big Game Sunday awesome, we can make the Monday after awesome too," reads the petition. "Make that Monday more like Sunday. Make it a Smunday and have more Sunday on your Monday than any of us have ever had in our lives. Don't settle. Sign it. For your sanity. For your family. For your country."
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