There is another reason not mentioned in the answer and that is that the people running a venue, whether theatre, cinema or other, take half a ticket stub in case of emergencies. If you have to evacuate the venue, then the management can count the number of ticket stubs and compare to the number of people evacuated - this is to ensure no one is left inside the venue and run the risk of having someone injured/killed by the emergency.
As seen at http://www.straightdope.com/classics/a2_027a.html
I’m not sure this makes sense. After all, if somebody left during intermission, the count would be off unless you had people watching every exit and counting people. It certainly wouldn’t work in a big multiplex where everyone enters through one central ticket-taker, but the movies start and end at different times with people leaving through lots of exits.
(Speaking as a software engineer who’s tracked down many a refcount bug in my time, this is a count I wouldn’t want to try to keep accurate…)
Tickets are numbered on both ends. This is because when the ticket is torn both the seller and the taker are in sync. If a customer presents a ticket to the taker with a number out of sync with the roll , he/she will know the stub was probably picked up off the ground or given to them from another day.
Also, with most responsible orginazations, at the end of the day the total of both stubs are weighed seperately and must match.
At an Indianapolis Indians (AAA minor league baseball) game the other day, the “ticket taker” scanned the barcode on my ticket, and he didn’t tear it at all. Things change with the available technology.
I’m confused as to what they are weighing… doesn’t the customer keep the other half?
Numbers in sync? Ya… because I’m sure the guy making minimum wage checks real well. Besides, isn’t that more complicated then looking at the date on the ticket? I’m assuming we must be talking about 30 years ago before all the tickets were printed when you buy them.
Maybe the obvious… so you can’t hand your buddy the ticket or try to use the next day and hoping noone reads the ticket carefully.
While there is several benefits for having tickets stubs, as a former theatre manager I doubt that ticket stubs would be much use in an emergency. Generally the box( the ticket seller) could just see what ticket we were on, to see how many people were inside. I as a manager and hopefully my staff would be more concerned in making sure our patrons got to safety in an emergency that to get the the ticket stub box. The ticket stubs that the theatre keeps is just one of several ways we keep up with sales.
Generally the ticket stubs are more a concern to the movie distributer as a “fall-back” on ticket sales than it is to the movie theatre itself. Since the 1970s ticket stubs have played a more important role in keeping people from “screen” hopping. The movie studios and distributers receive all their money as a percentage of the ticket sales so when a patron pays for “Halloween Part 27”
but sneaks into “Stars Wars 7: George Lucas needs Money”…George Lucas loses money.
I was just at my son’s play, and they tore the ticket, kept one half and gave me the other. There seemed to be no reason to do this, except that the patrons expected them to. Tearing the ticket is just a way of indicating that the patron has been “admitted,” as far as I could tell.
As explained in Cecil’s column in the first place, the reason is to allow the management to check the box-office stubs (which the customer never sees) against the usher stubs, as a way of countering certain scams.
Heck, I was just at a cash bar in a hotel that required me to pay for a ticket at a register next to the bar and then turn in my ticket to the bartender (two steps away) to get my drink.