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Job Number Six, Movie Theater Part One

A movie theater is the perfect place to work while in school. During the Fall, Winter and Spring, when you’re in school, the theater has a shorter schedule. They tend to only have afternoon and evening shows during the week, so you can finish classes by 3pm and then go to work in the evening. Then they have a full day on the weekends when you’re off from classes. Summer has full-time hours and students are generally off for the Summer, so you can work extra, too. Plus, there are all the perks of working at a movie theater, right? People tend to think the following things about a movie theater job:

You can watch all the movies for free.

You get free concession snacks.

You get the inside scoop on all the latest and upcoming movies.

I’m here to set the record straight. Though this is probably the most fun job I’ve ever had, it was mainly due to working with a lot of my friends who loved the same things as me, like comic books, video games, cartoons and movies. We had great conversations of just quotes from The Simpsons, we’d choreograph lightsaber duels, and play Perfect Dark until our eyes couldn’t stay open any longer.

The job itself wasn’t as much fun as the company at the job.

First, you can’t watch movies for free. Well, you can, but not on weekends or holidays when the theater makes the most money from paying customers. Personally, I had two days off – Tuesday and Thursday. So I could see free movies on those days, but when do you feel like visiting work on your days off? It was a 30-minute commute for me and my husband (working with a spouse is a totally different story, but I’ll get to that), so we didn’t always feel like driving to work on our days off.

So when a customer would ask us if a movie was any good, and we replied, “I haven’t seen it,” and they would reply with, “What do you mean you haven’t seen it? You get to see all the movies for free, right?” I’d have to respond with the above paragraph. Yeah, picture that happening twenty times a day. Or maybe it was more. It definitely felt like more. That’s another thing – customers expect you to remember them. At our building, we had five
theaters, each one seating at least 100 people, and we were a smaller theater. I’d see hundreds of different people per day, and they’d expect me to remember them? Moving along…

Number 2 in that list was about free concession snacks. Yes it is true that we could have all the popcorn and soda we wanted, even when we went into a theater to see a movie, but we could only use the tiny courtesy cups. You see, the popcorn bags and soda cups were all counted at the end of the night, every night. Everything had to be accounted for, so we couldn’t use any of them unless we paid for it.

Price is another issue. People always ask how movie theaters could get away with charging so much. Well, the answer to that is that you still pay it, don’t you? The real question is why do they charge so much, and the answer is simple – The concession stand is the only place a movie theater makes a profit. You hear about films making millions of dollars at the box office? Well, a theater doesn’t see any of that money, it all goes to the actors, actresses, directors, producers, composers and the rest of the crew. And from what I understand, movie theaters have to pay to show trailers at the start of a film, so they’re actually losing money right off the bat. That’s why they charge so much for food and drinks!

And finally, we get the inside scoop, right? Listen, movie theater attendants are in NO way connected to the film industry, other than showing the final product. We know about as much as you do! Often people who work in a movie theater have an interest in films, so we’ll share what we know, but we don’t have access to secret information or anything