Yesterday I was at my local megaplex and they seemed to be caught by surprise that a fair number of people had Monday (Columbus Day) off. So there was a big line at the box office (about 50 people) and just one window open for a 14-screen complex.
So, I went to the self-service machine and bought my friend and I tickets. When we went into the theater. They had no one to tear the tickets. No “theater 9, it’s on your right, enjoy your film!”
We just walked in and used our keen sense of direction to find the movie we wanted to see.
But, is the theater’s accounting off at all because they don’t have their end of the stubs? They got their money presumably from the credit card.
Also, the tickets came out of the machine with another ticket which I was supposed to sign, but I didn’t because there was no one around to give that to either.
While I admire your dedication, and by no means do I think that it is okay to steal due to others’ lack of attention, but it sounds like whatever problem there is, it is the movie theater’s. You appeared, you paid (or attempted to pay), you were led to believe that you had paid, you received a ticket, you attempted to present the ticket. You fulfilled your end of the contract.
This is no problem. I’ve talked to some of the ticket tearing people when waiting in line for a movie. Apparantly they do nothing with those stubs anyway. The stubs pile up in the little pedistal for days and then they eventually throw it all out. I laughed when I heard this and asked what is the point of tearing the ticket.
Basically, the only thing tearing the ticket prevents is a person getting a refund by claiming “I bought these tickets but never saw the movie because I had to leave right away”. Other than that, I think the ticket tearing is still done because it’s tradition and people “expect” it.
Ticketing systems are intended as much to keep the theater staff from stealing money as to keep unpaid customers out (and provide a receipt for refunds, etc.). If the cashier took the money and just let you in without a ticket, the theater manager would have no way of knowing that the ticket seller hadn’t put every other person’s money in his pocket. By having two people (ticket seller and ticket taker) involved in each transaction, and the ticket as the record of the transaction, stealing is made more difficult (although not impossible). And a physical record is retained.
Stub audits can be used to match receipts against attendance, but the process is obviously tedious and time consuming. Computerized ticketing systems have replaced the pre-printed numbered tickets Cecil spoke about in his old column, and they have vastly simplified the process and added new and advanced capabilities (e.g. automated hourly reporting of sales data to the head office) that were impossible with the old manual systems.
So the answer to the OP is, although it was a violation of SOP, and opened the theater up to fraud by its employees, it didn’t literally throw off their accounts. I haven’t worked in ticketing in more than 15 years, and I never worked at a multiplex, so I don’t know how lax or rigorous standard industry practice is with regard to stubs these days. But as Bear can attest, careful accounting for stubs doesn’t appear to be a very common practice.
Computers give the impression of precision and perfection, but unless spot checks are occasionally done of the stubs, the manager can’t be sure that a clever conspiracy between cashiers and ticket-takers isn’t ripping him off. I suspect it happens a lot more than people would expect.
Oh, and BTW, that extra ticket you got was your credit card receipt. You were supposed to keep it.
Ticket sellers and ushers ripping off the theater is one reason for the saved torn ticket stub.
Another is so that the theater manager doesn’t rip off the theater owner. And so that the theater owner doesn’t rip off the movie distributor.
At any time, one of these operatives can swoop in and demand to do a head count of the theater v. a count of torn stubs in the usher’s podium.
For those that actually save the stubs, it’s because someone in this chain of accounting wants to be able to do a spot audit at a later date. And if a spot audit turns up something fishy, then they’ll go through all the stubs.
The problem for the theater is that by not taking your ticket, if you are dishonest you can give it to a friend and they can use it to see the film free.
I think the funny thing was that there were a lot of people, like me, who stood by the boxes where they drop in the ticket stubs, waiting for someone to come by and tear the tickets.
The good people of the Pacific Theater chain haven’t come after me. But I did pay! Honest, I did!
I will note that if you had bought the ticket at the window, the person probably would have ripped the ticket right there. That’s what they do around here for early weekday shows that have no ticket taker. I suppose they figure no one will use the ticket machines because there is generally no line then.
Don’t know if this has any bearing, but: back when I worked in a theater, we would occasionally have to give a refund. In order to do that, we would ask for the return of their stub, then dig through the torn stubs looking for the other half of the same ticket (identified by serial number), stamp them “VOID”, staple them to a form, and send it to the head office. Not sure why this was the procedure, but dammit, it was the procedure, and we followed it.
This was back in the days before computers printed each ticket on demand. Every day we loaded up the big, pre-numbered ticket rolls, noted the start number of each roll on a log sheet, and noted the number again at the end of the day. I suppose in some small way the stub in the pedestal proved that the person actually attended that day’s show, but the serial number on their stub could prove that by itself.
Anyway. There you go, some more confusion for you.
Not really.
Theatres are still ‘required’ to hold the the days stubbs in seperate containers for thirty days. The numbers on the tickest are recorded for each film for each day. Even non-computerized ticket sellers do this but your ticket still have a number on it.
The ticket numbers are reported to the film companies every week, and they show the daily ticket useage.
So let’s say you own a theatre and you are showing Friday Night Lights.
You report that you started at ticket number 100001 on Friday morning and at the end of Friday the ticket roll read number 10125. So you sold 124 tickets. (we are going with only one price admissions for simplicity but different prices, matinee or child or senior all have different ticket numbers). In theory, the studio or your home office may send an auditor to your theatre and the ticket stubbs for Friday Night Lights for Friday should be in a bag someplace.
This may happen if say all the other theatres in town sold 600 tickets for that day and your theatre and normally your theatre sells about the same number of tickets as everyone else.
As numerous other posters have pointed out, a large reason for keeping ticket stubs is to check up on both employees and theatre managers.
When I worked at a theatre (about twenty years ago) my crooked manager would actually have me sell kids tickets at the adult price to supposedly “make-up” money we were short from concessions sales. A different manager was busted for offering “free” passes if you bought a large popcorn and soda and a theatre across town got busted for running a scam where you prepurchased a large popcorn and two large cokes and you got a free ticket. This boosted concessions sales and made the managers look good but was actually stealing money from both the studios and the theatre owners.
But that was better than the scam (unrelated to tickets) that got a bunch of people fired at my theatre shortly before I was hired. At the time, we did figured out how many popcorn tubs and soda we sold by keeping an inventory of the containers which were counted each evening. Some enterprising employees would take the tubs they found when cleaning the theatre after the show and reuse them. :eek:
The last couple of times we went to our local multiplex theater, no one tore up our tickets. Got our popcorn and walked on in to see the film we paid for. No one was at any entrance to check the validity of our presence.
After the movie, we could have seen another in the same complex at no charge, and I wouldn’t have felt the least bit guilty if we had.
Rather than starting on time, movie houses around here first inundate us with ads and mindless trivia games, then come on with a deafening barrage of coming attractions.
My understanding from what I keep reading and hearing (though, I have no documentary proof), is that the local theater owner sees very little of the price of the ticket. By distribution contract, the movie makers get almost all of the ticket price.
However, local theaters keep all the profit of the concessions (or, their parent company of the chain does, but, they reward local managers who do well in concessions). And so, the local theater has no real incentive to collecting money from your tickets. If it were up to them, they’d let you in for free, because that would bring in more people who would be more likely to buy from the concessions stand.
And the mark-up on the concessions is incredible. The four dollar bucket of popcorn was made with five cents of corn kernels. The two and half dollar soda was made with seven cents of syrup and six cents of carbonation (from a tank). [The figures aren’t exact, but they’re in that range.]
That’s why the movie moguls want the ticket stub system, it’s they’re way of making sure local theater managers (or their lackeys) aren’t letting in people for free – their profit is in the ticket, and the manager couldn’t care less about the ticket.
Actually, procedurally speaking and apart from moral and legal issues, having a whole ticket wouldn’t have let you do that. Your ticket specified a particular show and time, and once that show was over, the ticket was no good. If anyone had checked it, the fact that it wasn’t torn shouldn’t have made any difference, except that you might have (unethically) asked for a refund or exchange.
In fact, there’s little or nothing to prevent customers at most multiplexes from buying one ticket and then seeing two or or even three films, whether the ticket has been torn or not. That’s because most theaters put the ticket-taker at the main entrance and don’t check stubs at the entrance to each screen, unless it’s the opening weekend of the latest big blockbuster and shows are sold out. For the reasons Moriah pointed out, theater staff have little incentive to keep you from show jumping if there’s a possibility you’ll buy more popcorn or soda.
And as for the income breakdown, theaters keep about 50% of the box office in the long run. Most film leases work on a sliding scale, where the distributor gets a large percentage (90% or more) in the first week or two, and less as the film gets older. The theater does make a lot on the concession sales, but the importance of that income stream is often exaggerated in the public imagination. (Or so I’m told by friends in the business.)
BTW, the most common scam pulled by theater staff, and the one Cecil referred to, is ticket palming. The ticket taker takes your ticket, doesn’t tear it, and if he gives you back anything at all (some don’t even bother), it’s someone else’s stub. He passes a batch of untorn tickets to a confederate who returns them to the box office for a refund. It’s easier if a cashier is in on the scam, but it’s not necessary.
For practically the first century of the movies’ existence, it was an article of faith in the exhibition industry that you couldn’t play commercials in a movie theater: audiences wouldn’t stand for advertising after they’d paid to get in. Well, I guess we’ve shown them what sheep we are. Some people may say they hate it (I do), but we keep on going.
