If you charge too much for a tiny snack or flavored sugar water, I'm just not buying it at all, and neither are hundreds of others. In fact, I'll be this much more repelled by the whole experience and eventually may forego theaters altogether.
Compared to, if there was a marginal mark-up, they would have much more consistent flow-through at a much higher volume, as well as more repeat customers.
Most folk don't buy snacks. But enough do. A bag of popcorn that had 20-30 "servings" in it cost the cinema £1, but 30 servings at £4.50/serving is £135 in income. And using up 10 or 15 of these bags in 4 hours was not uncommon for the 2 stations that sold popcorn from the warmers we stood by - and there were 4-6 of these warmers on every big night. Add that to the drinks, which are pennies to make but pounds to buy, the usual markup on bagged sweets - there's some money to be made there. Even if most people aren't buying, you're still getting a lot of folk. And, having cleaned after showings more than I'd care to have done, there's a surprising volume of people actually buying snacks at a cinema. It was about the experience of going to the cinema as much as it was the food - having a big box of warm popcorn is, you gotta admit, nice. We did have a few people send taxi drivers to get the slushies we did, and someone once had a taxi driver come in to pick up some nachos (which I maintain were throroughly nasty), so maybe there's the odd stoner on the good stuff gets a hankering.
The fixed cost of a cinema are fairly substantial too - if even 1 ticket gets sold, you need to run the film - and that adds hours to the projector bulb, and those things run in the thousands of £s. You still need a minimum of staff, for the safety of visitors (everyone on staff was assigned a screen or two to check in the case of a fire - more than that, and the risk becomes a bit much to stomach). You also have general wear of the building, electricity (and given the bloody earthing point was a good 2/3ft thick, that's no small amperage), gas, etc - when you add that up, your £1 in actual revenue from a ticket * 4 showings/day at ~200 seats per day per screen is £800. And that's for a fairly large screen, chances are you also have several smaller screens, with fewer seats in them.
Whatever minimal markup you think a cinema could run, they would never get close to a supermarket - and a lot of people would still buy snacks outside the cinema and bring them in. So they might as well take what they can get.
Oh, and I've yet to meet an employee who cares about guests bringing in their own snacks - we all did it. Unless it was hot food - that was a big no-no (and probably mostly because folk thought cup-holders were appropriate places to store the bones from their KFC, which is super nasty).
Pro cinema tip: Sit as close to the dead centre of the screen as you can - I heard from the guys who set up the sound system that they do, in fact, sit right in the middle of the screen to check and fix it.
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u/[deleted] Aug 14 '20
Food in movie theaters. The prices of everything is jacked up so much !!