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We're putting in a small "storefront" art/classics theatre with about 100 seats
or a little less.
What size popcorn kettle is adequate?
8 oz or 12 oz?
We'll do a lot of family and kid stuff.

The art house here bought a 32 oz for 150 seater its barely big enough.

You never want to run out of your most profitable item so you should always buy the largest kettle size.

We've been running a 322 seat single screen for over 5 years with a 14 oz gold medal popper. Just mentioning this to give perspective.
The machine is full before show and we don't run out if we are very careful to start popping before people arrive in big numbers. With this popcorn machine we probably only run into that kind of trouble when seating over 150 people at once. In other words you can probably put a smaller machine in and do OK - just pay close attention. This one is the largest that we could find that would run on our power supply without major electrical work. It also doesn't cost $6,000 --- just $1500 or so with the oil pump included.

If I get more screens I will have to upgrade and we have run close at times on big films like Monsters, but I have run out of ice before popcorn.

Get a 20 or 32 oz popper. You definately do not want to run out of your most profitable item. With all of the recent theatre closings, you should be able to find even these nice big machines cheap. For the smaller machines, Cretors makes a nice 14 oz counter top popper, I think its called the profiteer. Good Luck to you!

The art house here got a steal on a almost brand new 32 gold medal popper ( the $7000.00 one) for $700 bucks!

GTE-
There should be lots of great deals like that around now,with all the closings. My company would rather trash an older popper than store it. I recently went along to a 4-screen we were closing to help with loading some booth equipment. I ended up taking 2 floor model popcorn warmers out for myself, they were going to be in the dumpster if I hadn't. I hate seeing something I can use get tossed

My observation of chain theater closings is that they do not want to sell the equipment AND they don't want to store it so it either it goes in the dumpster or is taken by an employee present at the closing. This does not mean that the equipment is available for me to buy. If I know the right person I can get it for free. Or maybe on ebay when the employee decides to make a profit. I have even seen seats slashed and put in the dumpster so that they could not be used by anyone else. I think that is the intent much of the time - keep it out of any competitors hands.

track food if you find they are trowing away booth equipment let me know.
I could always use some free stuff.


[This message has been edited by GTEntertainment (edited December 21, 2001).]

Talking about throwing away perfectly good equipment?

All of the kitchen equipment we will be using for the drive-in came from a local university here in Nashville. When this university was remodeling their student center food court, they tore out the Dairy Queen, the Pizza Hut & Subway sandwich shop, and replaced them all with a Starbucks.
As they removed all of the equipment, they rolled it all down to the parking lot where it sat for 3 months. Since my wife was the bookkeepper for the food service company, her boss knew of our plans for the drive-in and said we could take as much as we wanted for free. He said if we didn't take it, it was all going in the roll-off dumpster.

We ended up with a 42" flat grill, 2 DQ soft-serve ice cream machines, a refrigerated/freezer sundae topping bar, 3 sandwhich prep tables, a roll-in freezer, 2 mobile fryer filter units, heat lamps, 2 - 3 compartment sinks with drain boards, heated french fry dump stations, pizza conveyor oven, etc. One of the deep fryers we got had never been used before, it still had the cardboard liners inside the fat wells, and the baskets were shrink wrapped!!
That's all that we could fit in the Ryder truck, the majority of the equipment there was trashed.

There's no telling how much that equipment costs, all of it is less than 5 years old, and they were going to trash it!! It was definetely a case of being in the right place at the right time, and knowing the right people.

I can tell you from first hand that the smaller kettle will pop the better tasting popcorn. the smaller kettle will take more monitoring, like stated above, to start poping in plenty of time to handle any crowd but my small ketttle machines have the following of my customers. I have the largest kettle made by creators but when I use my older small machines for express or street sales my regulars will wait for that popcorn over the new machine any day. I would too! There is a diverence if you can afford the time a samll machine takes.