Despite the awful weather, the sort of people who make projections about the economic impact of hosting a Super Bowl still think it was a pretty good week for Dallas Arlington North Texas.
Winter weather delivered a blow, but the local economy still benefited from Super Bowl XLV — thanks largely to a warmer weekend.
Direct spending from the Super Bowl may have reached the $200 million to $250 million range, according to an estimate by Planalytics, a business weather intelligence firm in Pennsylvania.
The spending total would have been as much as $25 million higher if the week’s weather had been more typical, according to Planalytics, which receives sales data within about six hours from retailers, restaurants and others.
“I was surprised. I thought the impact from the weather would have been much greater,” Scott A. Bernhardt, chief operating officer at Planalytics, said Monday. “After Tuesday, everything just stopped, but the floodgates opened on Thursday.”
Per person spending between Thursday and Sunday averaged $1,200, Bernhardt said. At recent Super Bowls, spending usually worked out to about $1,000 per person.
Color me skeptical. The anecdotal evidence collected in the story paints a decidedly mixed picture. Some places did a lot better than others. Let’s see what the official sales tax data for February says. That’s due out in April, and we can argue about what it all means then.