Instead Of Spending Millions On A Superbowl Ad, Heinz Is Giving Its Employees The Day Off

Instead of a costly Super Bowl ad, Kraft Heinz is giving its employees the day off

Whether your team won or lost the Super Bowl, you’ll probably want to skip work the next day. Even if you didn’t drink too many beers or eat your body weight in nachos, Mondays suck so let’s make the day after the Super Bowl a national holiday.

Face it, America doesn’t have enough holidays or days off. The Europeans laugh at our manic work ethic. And while we probably don’t need 30+ days off, an extra day couldn’t hurt. Kraft Heinz is all about skipping work the day after the game. So instead of spending about $5 million for a ridiculously short TV ad during the Super Bowl, the company is giving its salaried office workers the following day off. And while we don’t even know what teams are playing, we do support naps and therefore are all about making “Smunday” happen.

The company behind what feels like the only ketchup to ever exist has taken their “Smunday” campaign to the interwebs and launched a Change.org petition to make the sacred Monday an official holiday. “We can all agree that going to work the Monday after the ‘Big Game’ on Sunday is awful,” the company shared. “So as far as we’re concerned at Heinz, we as a nation should stop settling for it being the worst work day of the year.” If they convince 100,000 people to sign their petition, Kraft Heinz said they’ll send it to Congress. On Wednesday night more than 27,000 people had committed to “Smunday.”

Less than 30,000 people seems awfully small considering more than 16 million Americans call in sick or just don’t show up to work the day after the Super Bowl. Heard that. At every job I’ve had at least one dude called in sick or just didn’t show up the day after the Super Bowl. Some just started saving a vacation day for their massive hangovers. And according to Kraft Heinz: “For those that do, productivity plummets so far that the country loses on average around $1 billion.” We imagine as word spreads more football (and nap) fans will pledge their support for the new national holiday.

And while various media outlets have called the petition a marketing stunt to get Kraft Heinz extra attention online, their officials seem pretty passionate about the day off. “We hope other brands and companies join us and get behind this effort. … What we really want to do is make this a reality,” Nicole Kulwicki, head of Heinz brands, told the Chicago Tribune. “We’ve been talking about this for years and decided it was finally time to rally behind this for the American people.”