Ketchup company Kraft Heinz is topping off Super Bowl Sunday with "Smunday," a day-after vacation day for its employees, and circulating a petition for Smunday to become a national holiday.
When the company's Change.org petition — which says more than 16 million employees miss work the Monday after the Super Bowl — reaches 100,000 signatures (it had nearly 35,000 signatures Friday afternoon), it will be sent to Congress.
Kraft Heinz decided not to spend millions on a Super Bowl commercial this year and hopes the Smunday campaign will generate social media buzz and equal any publicity they would have gotten from an ad during the big game, but regardless of the success or failure of their campaign, “thousands” of their employees will have a day off, CBS News reported.
Thirty-second Super Bowl commercials cost an estimated $5 million last year, according to Bloomberg. Kraft Heinz featured dogs dressed as hot dogs in its 2016 ad but wanted to try something different this year.
There is no known estimate of what the day off will cost Kraft Heinz.
The company, which in addition to ketchup makes Planters products, Jell-O, and Velveeta, formed after a 2015 merger facilitated by Warren Buffet and 3G Capital. Approximately 42,000 employees work for the company, which in recent years had had to cut thousands of jobs, shut down factories, and cut corporate expenses in order to improve margins.
Kraft Heinz factories will still be in operation on "Smunday," Feb. 6, Bloomberg reported, since those workers are mostly hourly rather than salaried.
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