I did not want to hijack another related thread here. I was watching a sit-com where everyone came in the cinema with those enormous popcorn buckets -even an 8-year old kid. I thought it was a joke and I laughed. Then I realised the sit-com had no canned laughter for that.
I know they have large popcorn at the cinemas here, but the buckets in America look enormous. Is that really true?
Not sure how big they were in the show you were watching, but it’s probably accurate. Sadly, many things in America are far bigger than they need to be. Even the people.
Yes, it’s true. Typical movie popcorn bucket sizes.
I don’t think most customers get one huge bucket apiece, though. Aside from being more than even a typical American could eat, with what they charge for those, getting one for each member of the family would require taking out a second mortgage. I’ll sometimes get a large bucket for my family of four to share, and sometimes we even finish most of it before the movie is over …
Yeah, like SCSimmons said, a lot of the time you’ll just have people share the big buckets. At most theatres I’ve been to, the biggest size buckets and sodas came with free refills, making them more economical (then the problem became finding the right time to run for a refill if the movie was good. I missed a fairly interesting scene in Serenity when the movie first came out because I ran out of popcorn and didn’t know how much longer the movie would be going for.
Of course, if you watch Star Wars Episode II: Attack of the Clones, you’ll find that George Lucas was thoughtful enough to put in a nice long break in the middle of the movie for everyone to take needed pitstops and get more refreshments. The entire sequence on Naboo basically.
In addition, the gigantic buckets are not that much more expensive than the simply large ones, so it makes economic sense for people to get big ones and share. I don’t have data, but I suspect the delta in cost for the theater is very small. Sodas in the US work the same way - you can get a too big one for not much more than a medium one.
The popcorn buckets in the US can engulf many small children at once, so although we obviously don’t know what you saw, it was probably real.
Many US movie theaters don’t even sell “small” popcorn buckets. And their “medium” is bigger than Spain’s “large”!
I got a friend of mine a full sized popcorn machine on wheels for Christmas last year, the kind you see at fairs and such. I wasn’t sure how much oil or popcorn it would use so I got a generous amount of both. We’ve made A LOT of popcorn and have barely touched the supplies. It is so inexpensive we’d often make a full batch (It’s tougher to make a smaller batch), enough to feed 20 people easy, just for two or three servings, then just toss the stuff.
I never would have guessed that the large bucket costs $2.00. (50 to a case, $25/case)
Still over priced for the purchase, but good luck finishing one on your own. At home I do pop about 64oz (by volume) at a time, and after Mrs. Butler & I have had our fill, we do have leftovers.
It’s cheap, filling, and reasonably good for you (limited oil used in the pop, with no added butter).
Popcorn pricing also encourages people to buy large sizes, even if they’re not going to eat the whole bucket. You might see something like:
Small (32 ounce): $5.25
Medium (46 ounce): $5.50
Large (85 ounce): $5.75
Jumbo (130 ounce): $6.00 OMG BEST VALUE!!!
Same thing with fountain drinks: the small 12 or 16 ounce drinks will only be priced a few cents less than the 64 ounce tubs.
There’s actually a business economics reason for large portions in America, other than “Americans are hogs, aren’t they?”
The food service industry – and movie theaters are primarily food service – makes razor-thin profits and they cannot survive if people purchase only nutritionally reasonable sizes. They have to sell large amounts of food in order to make enough profit to stay in business. (The actual cost of the food input is quite low, especially on sodas, so they make a profit there to cover all their other expenses.)
Slight hijack: I like to sprinkle leftover popcorn atop hot tomato soup. A nice treat on a cold winter’s day.
I can’t figure out your math or your vision.
That site says that small is 100 per case for $25.00 or .25 each.
Medium is 100 per case for $30.00 or .30 each.
Large is 50 per case for $33.00 or .66 each.
Jumbo is 50 per case for $46.00 or .92 each.
Better lay off the butter in your popcorn. It’s clogging your arteries! 
… and for those of you overseas who haven’t actually seen these tubs, the largest ones are about a foot across and deep. You could fit a football (either kind) inside one.
Well, it’s better than in the UK, where you got those giant transvetites selling albatrosses. <shudder>
And you don’t get wafers with it, either.
And note that it’s a website for home theater buffs to buy popcorn buckets for their dens. The actual buckets (or bags, our place switched to flmsy paper bags again) in the quantities that movie theaters buy them are a few cents each.
I knew something was wrong on the popcorn front a few years ago when we went to the movies and I ordered a “medium size” popcorn and Coke and handed the cashier a ten-dollar bill and only got a quarter back. :eek:
Now, are those “ounces” for the popcorn US fluid ounces? Wouldn’t dry measure be more appropriate (dry pints, quarts, gallons, pecks, bushels)? Or are they the weight of the popcorn?
I’m going to assume that they are volume units: US fluid ounces (29.6 mL). Then, the “small” size (32 ounce) that elmwood mentioned is 947 mL, the “medium” is 1.36 L, the “large” is 2.52 L, and the “jumbo” is 3.85 L. Note that the “jumbo” is also approximately 3.5 dry quarts, or 0.87 dry gallons, or 0.11 bushels.
I think those are bigger than the typical sizes in Canada as well. We often get drinks and such advertised in some sort of fluid ounces as well, even though if thay are labeled, they must be labeled in metric.
I assumed thay were US fluid ounces simply because the manufacturers were in the States. One US fluid ounce is 1.041 Imperial fluid ounces (yes, the Imperial fluid ounce is smaller: the US (fluid) gallon of 3.79 L is divided into 128 US fluid ounces, but the Imperial gallon of 4.55 L is divided into 160 Imperial fluid ounces).
US Customary System of Units (from Wikipedia)
Silly, you’re not buying the popcorn, you’re buying the bucket. The popcorn comes free as a marketing gimmick. I always assumed they were measurements of the liquid volume of the container.
Well, if I’m buying the bucket and the popcorn is free, I’ll get them to omit the popcorn, and then I can take the bucket home and keep my Lego collection in it.