Some of them are as cute as the dickens, fersure.
Only if you don’t want to buy a ticket to a later show. Do you always go immediately in as soon as you buy a ticket?
Somewhat later than Dickens. When I was a kid in the 1950s and 1960s they were always a little booth outside the main entrance.
having the ticket seller outside saved energy. they made them sit in this unheated booth and wear a coat.
the line of precustomers was on the sidewalk outside. if the ticket seller were inside then the line would go out through a door, held open by people in the line, letting heat from the building escape.
newer theaters might be designed differently allowing for precustomer to queue inside a large lobby or in a mall. old theaters i’ve seen had a smaller hallway back into the theater, the front building space to the sides were small storefronts rented to provide revenue; the theater didn’t have to pay for mostly unused heated space,
A few theaters I go to have outside windows. Not separate booths but windows. All of those are behind glass. Some other theaters have the ticket line inside. No glass. Around here I figure it has more to do with cold and bad weather than security.
Well, if you have to concede that a ticket (proof of admission) must be sold, it’s more efficient for one person to handle the sales and money and another to guard the ropes - especially if there’s more than one rope portal.
I remember a tiny fourth-run house we used to take the kids to. Immediately to the left of the front door was the ticket booth - you bought your tickets there from the nice man. You went through the door, and the nice man turned and tore your ticket, then waved you through the rope gate. If you wanted cokes and popcorn, the nice man would step down the counter and sell them to you.
It always amused me, but then, I grew up in a ‘palace’ theater with a large uniformed staff.
Sometimes when the theater is slow, there is no one standing there to tear the tickets, and it’s done at the ticket booth. In the case of my local multiplex, the theaters are in two sections, each with their own person to tear tickets. Also, it’s way more than ten feet between the ticket seller and the person who tears the tickets. More like 150 feet.
Maybe its just my area (DC metro area). In all of the venues I attend the ticket counter is inside the building, so it isn’t to keep out the elements, and in at least one case the theater is relatively new (about 7 years old). They are all also owned by AMC/Regal so it may be a company quirk.
Besides the obvious advantage of allowing one to buy tickets at a more convenient time (as mentioned by others), this is to stop employee theft.
Whenever you see an arrangement where employee A takes the money and gives you a receipt and employee B then gives you the merchandise it often is set up like this to cut down on employee theft.
If the ticket taker just took money instead, then they could let folks through and pocket the $$$ from time to time.
As it is, there are several common movie theater scams out there.
This - you see this in many things like carnival rides, live shows, etc.
It also provides an audit trail. Movies are “rented” to the theatre for X% of the ticket sales. The start and end numbers of the tickets (in the good old days) were recorded and available for audit. Nowadays the electronic cash register is just as good an audit.
The glass booth -as mentioned, in the Good Old Days, many services like this where cash was handles were behind glass; just as old stores had those roll-down shutters to cover plate glass windows at night, and that sort of security. Tellers used to be behind a counter and glass up to about 6 feet tall.
Nowadays things are more open (i.e. harder to get away) so cashiers tend not to be enclosed.
I do not think the word “universally” means what you think it means.
Like this. I vaguely remember those outside ticket windows, but I don’t remember how long ago. Probably from the days of movie theaters that only had a single screen.
It occurs to me that it’s about 50/50 for the theaters I’ve been to lately and the ticket vendor is never “outside” - when there are glass partitions, the box office is completely indoors and weather protection is not an issue. I haven’t been to a theater with a streetside box office in… 20 years or more. This was probably the last such theater I visited, in the spring of 1983.
I don’t recall ever dealing with a crappy microphone system, though. When there’s a partition, there’s also a four-inch hole in the glass for easy communication with the vendor.
Here’s our local theater. The ticket windows are underneath the “TUR”. Outdoors, behind glass, microphone in the middle of the glass.
(Yes, people here take photos of the local movie place. It really is that dull here.)
As an afterthought, I guess the small glassed-in box offices holding one or two vendors each at the Marché-Central theater (part of the Guzzo chain) I go to most often (mainly because of its convenient location and parking) might be trying to invoke the now old-timey streetside booths, in addition to providing security against possible grab-and-run robberies. Other Guzzo theaters I’ve been to are similarly equipped. The non-Guzzo Colisée Kirkland and Banque Scotia Montréal (both owned by Cinéplex) are partition-free, or at least they were when I last visited. The vendors at those theaters are clustered together behind a large counter.
I’ve seen ticket windows inside an enclosed lobby, and many ticket windows set in the side of the building (with the customers buying from the outside).
Admittedly, though, most ticket sellers these days seem to be selling over an open counter, with n o glass in the way.
Lotsa theaters designed like that. The Modesto theater on McHenry likewise. Ticket booth is not a free-standing booth out in the street, but is part of the building; the customer window side faces the sidewalk in front.
The theater in nearby Riverbank has a huge indoor lobby with the ticket windows there. But that is enclosed in glass too.
Many of the new multi-plex theaters have HUGE lobbies, that almost resemble mini-shopping malls. Not that they actually have stores, but that huge concession stand, and all sorts of video games, sometimes even some smallish side rooms like video arcades. These kinds of theaters nearly remind me Chuck E Cheese places.
I have never scene this, barring an outdoor window to purchase tickets.
When I was working at the movies, one day I came in to work and saw that the glass over the center register in the box office was spiderwebbed.
It turned out that some angry customer had freaked out and smashed it with his fist when things weren’t going his way. I imagine the poor high school kid behind the glass must have peed his/her pants when it happened.
If someone else has pointed this out yet, I’ve missed it, but: Because they can? In most other purchasing experiences, the thing you’re purchasing is too large to fit through a tiny slot.
At least in my part of town, cashiers in convenience stores are sometimes behind bullet-resistant plexiglass. One store got robbed so many times even after installing security glass that they just gave up and shut the place down.
The climate/weather would have precluded an outside ticket booth in my part of the world, from the days of vaudeville to 3D digital movies, as it would in Antarctica.
Even if an outside booth had been heated, it wouldn’t have helped potential customers.
I recall one movie house that attempted to stay open by splitting its large auditorium into two theatres and installing electric heaters on the ceiling of its block-long marquee in the hope it would keep its potential customers from abandoning lineups in winter.
The theatre was forced to close anyway.