The goal should be to provide the best customer experience, so you get people to come back, without making too many sacrifices on revenue per customer. The ads are chump change, I’d even argue having them at all is an error, but intentionally making your product worse to pitch them is a clear disaster. The snacks are more relevant, but the rush to get a seat (and the risk of losing it) cuts both ways, and goodwill towards the theater is likely a big factor in whether people are willing to shell out that much.
Making an actual different-price auction makes people make hard decisions, as you note, so it’s a bad customer experience, same as getting put in a bad spot. So the goal is to design a system avoiding both; encouraging advance purchase of tickets to pick seats is a reasonable compromise, as is avoiding having terrible choices.
In the Ideal/Just World I’d like this to be true, but I’m not sure whether it actually plays out that way as reliably as I’d like. Right now theaters seem to be in an equilibrium where most of them do the same bad practices, making it hard to actually shop around.
(Meanwhile, I notice for myself that the biggest factor in which theater I go to is simply how close it is to my house, and what time it’s playing the movie I want to see)
I think a similar thing is at play with airlines – sure, there’s all kinds of ways I’d like the experience to be better, but it seems like most people basically just want cheap flights, and apart from egregious deceptive practices (where there’s so many add-ons you’re forced to buy that you learn to distrust the listed price completely), basically just going for cheap listed price seems to matter most.
An important bit with the Amazon article I linked is that most people don’t know how to value their time, so trying to solve the problem in a way that properly values people time does not naively pay off.
At least some of the time companies seem to succeed by consistently delivering great products that respect me as a person, but it’s far from obvious this is the dominating strategy even over the long term.
The ads give people time to arrive late and still buy snacks. And people who find them sufficiently aversive can just show up late, except for sold-out screenings. (Which are the ones the theatre least needs to intice people in for.)
From a quick google, it does look like the ads themselves don’t make much money, which surprises me a bit.
Though this doesn’t explain why they don’t simply remove the ads and keep the trailers, which have most of the same benefits plus I think many people enjoy watching them plus they bring people back.
The goal should be to provide the best customer experience, so you get people to come back, without making too many sacrifices on revenue per customer. The ads are chump change, I’d even argue having them at all is an error, but intentionally making your product worse to pitch them is a clear disaster. The snacks are more relevant, but the rush to get a seat (and the risk of losing it) cuts both ways, and goodwill towards the theater is likely a big factor in whether people are willing to shell out that much.
Making an actual different-price auction makes people make hard decisions, as you note, so it’s a bad customer experience, same as getting put in a bad spot. So the goal is to design a system avoiding both; encouraging advance purchase of tickets to pick seats is a reasonable compromise, as is avoiding having terrible choices.
In the Ideal/Just World I’d like this to be true, but I’m not sure whether it actually plays out that way as reliably as I’d like. Right now theaters seem to be in an equilibrium where most of them do the same bad practices, making it hard to actually shop around.
(Meanwhile, I notice for myself that the biggest factor in which theater I go to is simply how close it is to my house, and what time it’s playing the movie I want to see)
I think a similar thing is at play with airlines – sure, there’s all kinds of ways I’d like the experience to be better, but it seems like most people basically just want cheap flights, and apart from egregious deceptive practices (where there’s so many add-ons you’re forced to buy that you learn to distrust the listed price completely), basically just going for cheap listed price seems to matter most.
An important bit with the Amazon article I linked is that most people don’t know how to value their time, so trying to solve the problem in a way that properly values people time does not naively pay off.
At least some of the time companies seem to succeed by consistently delivering great products that respect me as a person, but it’s far from obvious this is the dominating strategy even over the long term.
The ads give people time to arrive late and still buy snacks. And people who find them sufficiently aversive can just show up late, except for sold-out screenings. (Which are the ones the theatre least needs to intice people in for.)
From a quick google, it does look like the ads themselves don’t make much money, which surprises me a bit.
Though this doesn’t explain why they don’t simply remove the ads and keep the trailers, which have most of the same benefits plus I think many people enjoy watching them plus they bring people back.