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Hi All, I'm working on the floor and business plan for a 2 screen 350-400 seat theatre in a relatively small town (6000 people, no competition). I'm looking at a community-owned operation that could be non-profit and it might be run by volunteers.

As a bit of background, people in Canada/Saskatchewan love using their debit cards. Everyone has one, everyone uses them. But most people have per transaction fees.

I would like people to spend as much as we can get them to when they are in the theatre, but if they have to pay for their tickets with their debit card, they might be less inclined to pull it out again for the concession, thus loss of concession sales. My thinking is have the two in one and sell tickets and concession at the same time. I think we would catch a lot of impulse buying.

Does anyone else have a combined ticket/concession booth? How do you feel this has affected your per-cap sales on concession items? Or is this just a bad idea???

Cheers,
Karla

Karla,

We have one register that serves for ticket sales and concessions. We do get the occassional complaint about the line but, for the most part, it works just fine for a smaller operation. To combat the line we use volunteers to fill sodas as quick as possible and we may end up revamping our register set-up or abandoning it entirely in favor of a streamlined computer set-up.

In any case, I think the per-caps are just fine. My per-caps are roughly at $2.25 per person (more or less depending on the movie) and I have reduced price concessions.

I say go for it! Good luck

Leeler

It seems to me that there would be a problem with lines. Our theatre lobby is fairly small and although I would be willing to try the idea I don't think our lobby could handle a line for regular tickets, tickets and concessions and then the traffic jam at the concessions counter. Do you both have large lobbies? How to you control the lines?

I have a very small lobby and could not accomodate another line (let alone staff it).

What I am thinking about is a "ticket at any till" concept where people would buy both tickets and concessions at the same till.

Because I am still in the design stage of the theatre, I am trying to determine what set up would be the most effective. I've heard that "ticket at any till" has increased some theatre's concession sales by 25%, so I figure that if it even made a bit of that increase, it would be worth it.

I'm thinking that I would have 2 or 3 lines that would both have tickets and concession sales. This way if things were slow, we would only have to have one person working in the front and could add staff as needed.

That's exactly what we do. We are also a two screen in a town of 5500. I have 3 RTS stations all with both tickets and concessions. When things are very slow, one person can take tickets and in the same opperation do concessions. Since we are small, we still accept personal checks, and people love to write one check for everything. Many have said that it would be better for check writers to just write it over and buy concessions with cash. But I found that if they can do it with one check, they'll get more thinking that it's the only chance they've got.