Here is some information:
Atlanta’s food and drink prices put every other Super Bowl stadium to shame
Mercedes-Benz Stadium makes the last decade of Super Bowl menu pricing look even more ridiculous.
Photo by Rich Graessle/Icon Sportswire via Getty Images
Super Bowl concessions prices
Stadium | Regular soda / water | Non-fancy beer | Sandwich, pizza slice, etc. | Fries, popcorn, pretzel, etc. | Total |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| 2011 Arlington, TX | $7 | $10 | $10 | $5 | $32 |
| 2012 Indianapolis | $4 | $8 | $8 | $5 | $24 |
| 2013 New Orleans | $5 | $12 | $9 | $6 | $32 |
| 2014 East Rutherford, NJ | $6 | $14 | $14 | $6 | $40 |
| 2015 Glendale, AZ | $7 | $12 | $9 | $8 | $36 |
| 2016 Santa Clara, CA | $10 | $13 | $10 | $10 | $43 |
| 2017 Houston | $11 | $12 | $16 | $7 | $46 |
| 2018 Minneapolis | $7 | $13 | $14 | $7 | $41 |
| 2019 Atlanta | $2 | $5 | $8 | $3 | $18 |
| Non-Atlanta average | $7.06 | $11.69 | $11.25 | $6.75 | $36.75 |
I found those by searching internet posts on food and beverage prices as far back as I could. These days, it’s an annual trend for sportswriters to take photos of the concessions menus at big sporting events and tweet them, with every website then making blog posts —Folks, have you seen these prices?? They’re the same as last year’s! — so it’s easy to research for almost the last decade.
It seems this trend began with JerryWorld’s first Super Bowl, which seems like a quite fitting birthplace for an Exorbitant Stadium Pricing narrative. So it’s hard to say how long These Prices have been This Crazy, but at least we now have a recent historical record.
As for which menu items I cited in here, I went with what felt like the most basic standard in each column. If a stadium offered a $30 souvenir soda (yeah, that’s real), I instead listed the price for regular soda, for example.
You’ll note Atlanta stands out on this list simply by being humane.
Mercedes-Benz Stadium launched a mini-trend in 2017 with a radical strategy: don’t try to bleed every human until they hate being inside your building.
“When you can come to an NFL stadium or a Major League Soccer stadium and be able to feed your family, a kid for $10, and get a hotdog, a refillable soda, a popcorn, and a pretzel, and right there you’ve only spent $8,” stadium general manager Scott Jenkins told SB Nation in 2017. “I don’t think there’s a sports venue in the country that can say that.”
Some other sports venues did see the reasoning behind letting fans eat food and pay the rent, with several college and pro teams following Atlanta’s lead by adopting sane pricing.
All along, Mercedes-Benz Stadium’s plan was to keep this model no matter the event, from Falcons games to United games to the college football National Championship to the Super Bowl. But even though Atlanta’s menu has been a point of internet curiosity for literally years now, expect lots of people to still be surprised and delighted by non-punishing prices at the biggest event in American sports (after they spend thousands to get in, of course).
Making slightly less money than you possibly could? Caring about whether people are happy after being in your venue? Is that legal? Won’t the shareholders or whatever riot?
And yeah, the Stankonia Dome’s Chick-fil-A will be closed during the Super Bowl.
To some people, this fact has been a knee-slapper for three years now, but it’s not that complicated.
- It’s a Chick-fil-A. By definition, it’s closed on Sundays.
- It’s open during the SEC Championship and Monday Night Football, because those aren’t Sundays.
- There’s another chicken sandwich joint that takes its place on Sundays. (It’s a little pricier, but it’s still way cheaper and way better than that $16 sandwich Houston’s Super Bowl was hitting you with.)
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