Movie Waste
For just over a month I have been working at a movie theater as an Usher. It’s not a bad job, it is also not a great job. We work hard for minimum wage, and seem to be under appreciated. I blame the fact that most of my co-workers are high-school kids, or college kids, and this job is not very important to them. I understand that completely. I felt that way when I worked at a grocery store back when I was in high school. Anyways, I didn’t want to talk about the job itself really. I wanted to talk about waste.
The theater creates a lot of garbage. Well, the customers create a lot of waste, the theater does nothing to recycle, or cut down on the waste. It’s very disgusting the amount of trash that gets thrown out. People get giant things of soda, giant tubs of popcorn, big boxes of candy, and amazing wads of napkins. Most people leave it in the theater for the Ushers to pick up. I am torn as to whether I would like them to pick up after themselves. If they did, my job would be boring and most likely obsolete, but it would give me greater respect for the movie patrons. Again my course is drifting, I wanted to focus on one piece of waste in particular, the movie ticket. This is a silly piece of paper that we require everybody to have. They get it at the ticket booth, walk 100 feet and give it to an Usher to tear. Most people don’t keep their tickets on them, and most tickets end up on the floor for Ushers to pick up later. Nobody needs a ticket really.
Lets take a second to think about your keychain. Do you have one of those little cards that you scan at the grocery store on it? I bet you do. It can easily save you money, and is also easy to use. If you scan this every time you shop for groceries the savings add up, and who keeps track of what you save on? The grocery store. That way they can give you targeted savings via coupons. I don’t know for sure, but I imagine that they have a centralized computer system that links every keychain card barcode to your information. It’s their way of tracking you and figuring out how much of what item you buy, and how they should best stock the stores. This is what movie theaters need to put in place.
Here is how it would work:
At the movie theater you would go to the ticket booth and buy your ticket, they would scan your keychain card and the movie you paid for would be attributed to your account. Ushers would no longer rip tickets, they would scan these cards. The movie theaters could track people to see exactly how many people went to each movie the same as they can now. The only difference would be that they might have some extra data, specifically whatever they decide to gather from customers: zip code, phone number, sex. They would also get a persons movie viewing frequency, and movie preference. The customer could also get points per purchase, or some sort of discount that they could use on movie tickets or concessions.
The only thing I haven’t figured out is how to deal with multiple people going to the movies when one person buys all the tickets. I imagine that the Usher’s scanner would just tell the Usher that the customer bought X number of tickets. That’s not a problem, the problem is when people leave the theater, do they need to take the keychain card with them? Perhaps there is a “safe” zone in the theater where it is just assumed that people have paid for tickets. This would require Ushers to be more vigilant with people sneaking in and not paying for tickets. That might be the hardest part, getting the Ushers to care enough. Perhaps paying them more would do the trick?
