Pizza? Order now or be prepared to wait

Planning to order out for pizza for the Super Bowl? Maybe you should place your order now.

Super Bowl Sunday is one of the top five days for pizza consumption, according to Pizza Today, a magazine that covers all things pizza.

Orders generally spike right before kickoff and halftime.

To avoid the crunch, Chicago area pizzerias are encouraging customers to place orders no later than Sunday morning. But today would be even better, they say.

"If you call at 5, 6 o'clock on Sunday," warns Giordano's spokesman Dan Hull, "you'll wait at least two and a half hours for your pizza. At least."

The Pizza Hut chain has been taking online orders for Sunday all week.

At Lou Malnati's in Lincolnwood, customers started calling in their Super Bowl orders the day after the Bears' victory over the New Orleans Saints, says manager Anand Shah.

The Malnati's chain also is encouraging customers to order half-baked pizzas that they can finish in their ovens at home.

If you tune in to sports radio and TV but still can't get enough Bears talk, try Bearscast.com.

The Web site features downloadable podcasts of three local Bears fans chatting about their team. With the Bears' success, it has become the most downloaded sports-themed podcast on iTunes that is produced by fans. In January, their shows were downloaded 160,000 times, double the number from any month during the season.

Think of what you could do with $61,000. An unidentified fan from Lake Forest spent that much to buy six premium tickets to the Super Bowl, at a staggering $10,287 a ticket. That is the most per ticket anyone has ever paid on Stubhub, an online ticket marketplace.

That free spending is why total ticket sales for this Super Bowl might gross more money than any previous event in the Web site's seven-year history. Through Thursday, total ticket sales ranked second only to the recent NCAA football national championship game. The site still had more than 1,400 listings for tickets for sale. Although prices were starting to drop, the average price was far from affordable at $4,323.

Tickets to Super Bowl XX in 1986 had a face value of $75. If the price had continued to rise at the rate of inflation, tickets today would be $138.

By comparison, the cheapest seat to see the Bears take on the Colts at Dolphins Stadium in Miami on Sunday is $600.