I checked ours for the past 3 weeks with Monsters,Inc was $2.06. We got hurt early on with Halloween, but have been posting bigger numbers since then.
Burney Falls - You must be doing a great job both with pricing your products and efficiently serving all those hordes you have with Harry. Kudos!
Roxy - I am with you! While we are able to book first run at the moment we have spent years in your shoes. People who frequent a discount theater have a hard time parting with more money at the concession stand than they paid for the movie. Not only do they comment on it, but they live it too! We have also broken our hearts trying to attract seniors who complain that your $1.00 of plain popcorn is too expensive. I don't know what works in your market, but I do know that we have usually been able to carry a per cap around 1.85 or so on discount. Like you, we can usually get that up for kids shows but it drops when we book arty film. We have a couple of tricks which would be sneared at by the chains but we think that they help us.
First, we offer a plain box of popcorn for $1.00 (cheapest #1 box - no butter offered because it leaks through). This works on people who weren't going to get anything (mostly seniors or cheapskates like me), but can also work for families who get everyone a box of popcorn instead of a shared bucket. They end up spending more than they would have otherwise, but they are happy.
Second , we also offer deals on the larger package deals so we sell a lot of Jumbo Deals $5.50 (32 oz drink & 130 oz corn), some Monster Deals $8.50 (44 oz drink & 170 oz corn & candy up to $2.00) and a fair number of Family Packs -$11.00(4 16 oz drinks, 170 oz corn & 2 lb Twizzlers). All of these appeal to people who like discounts and we can make them really fast so they don't hold up the lines.
Third, We stock and sell a lot $.75 candy and we have ways of separating kids from their quarters too - Tootsie pops, Cow Tales, etc).
Fourth - Kids Pacs $3.00 with choice of $.75 candy, child size drink and box of corn. We sell a ton of them and find that many families will buy one for each kid and then buy a Jumbo Deal for the parents. We found that parents can visualize this easily since other theaters sell it. We had to work out the tray issue, but ended up buying whatever clearance trays PMG has to sell. We are also getting our plastic child size cup from them.
(I currently have Monsters,Inc trays with The Road to Eldorado cups, but we just finished cases of Tigger Movie and generic Monster cups).
Fifth - If we can find a way to make and sell it efficiently we do. In addition to coffe, tea, hot cider, cappuccino and hot chocolate, we sell bottled water, juice boxes, grape punch, fruit punch and portion pac nachos. While we don't sell a lot of them we offer snack mixes,cookies, and Pringles. These items also keep me from feeling guilty after the concession stand is more or less closed up at night and the popcorn is gone. We can still selling them something.
Sixth - senior citizens will buy a small coffee and a box of popcorn if you can't sell them anything else. Some of them will even buy candy if inexpensive and traditional like Hershey bars, Jr Mints, Dots, Sno-Caps, Good n Plenty etc. So we end up stocking sour candy for kids and traditional favorites to get the grownups.
I am sure that this sounds like an awful lot of stuff to try to sell and you might think that we have lots of waste, a large concession stand and a large storage area. I am afraid not. I have a single station concession stand with popcorn machine on one side, candy case in middle with about 4' of counter before you hit the pop machine and the wall. Back counter is narrow - wide enough only for the standard Bunn coffee machine and butter machine. We have a set of shelves up the back wall which display every size of everything that we sell, so that customers can see what they are getting. New menu board from Pepsi was just delivered yesterday.
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