Upcoming changes at Western Film.

There's a few things afoot at Western Film over the next few months. Some good and some not so.

The Good.

New Seats- Probably in August all the seats and carpet on the main floor are going to be replaced. The carpet is pretty old and stained. There is going to be vinyl under the seats and maybe carpet still in the aisles. The seats haven't been chosen yet but will look similar to the pic. We aren't changing the layout in terms of elevation. The new seats may or may not be the same size so I'm not sure if the total number of seats will change. The new ones will probably have cup holders instead of the tablets, the tablets aren't needed since the room isn't being used for classes any more.

Website redesign- we are going to redo the website, I'm going to add a lot of pics and start embedding trailers. The current design doesn't match the decor of the theatre or the atmosphere I'm trying to create.

No Classes- Since the new classrooms opened downstairs the McKellar room isn't being used for classes any more. This should help with people thinking we aren't a 'real' theatre since we ran in a classroom. I always tried to get people to think of McKellar room as a movie theatre that also held classes rather than a classroom that showed films. There will also be more opportunity to rent the theatre out to show films to high school classes, student clubs etc.

The Not So.

New admission price- Come July 1 the ticket price will go up. I'll do another post on it later but basically we have to go up because of the HST.

New Snack bar prices- our costs for supplies have steadily gone up and with minimum wage raises driving up all the wages we pay we are going to have to raise prices at some point. I'm trying to keep it as low as possible. We aren't sure when the change will be.

Our ticket sales are not 'plummeting'?!

The previous post reminded me of something I meant to write. A couple of week ago the student newspaper The Gazette did a story on the USC's budget for next year. The VP-Finance was quoted as saying Western Film's ticket sales were 'plummeting' and our snack bar sales were 'skyrocketing'. I'm not sure where he got this from. I think it may be from looking at the numbers from the wrong part of the year. Our ticket sales were down because of weak product in the fall however when the Feb month end numbers came out a few days after the article we were within $300 of the ticket sales at the end of Feb last year. Snack bar sales are up compared to previous years and a higher percentage of ticket sales but aren't skyrocketing. Our snack bar sales are up for a couple of reasons. The new products such as Slush and Ice Cream and sales to non patrons of the movies. This is possible because of the permanent concession stand that opened in the last fiscal year. We couldn't sell things like Slush before because we didn't have room and the whole concessions stand got rolled away over a tile floor each night. A slush machine wouldn't stand up to that kind of abuse for long.

I hate when The Gazette pulls stuff like that out. It's not good for people to think a place is having problems. I always remember what happened to the old New Yorker Theatre. As soon as word got out it was for sale attendance dropped a lot. It's not like anything had actually changed, the owner wanted to retire. I guess people thought something was wrong with it or something.

Predictable but not Really.

One thing I find fascinating is how snack bar sales are fairly predictable in a generalized way but completely unpredictable in terms of individual items.

Generally the snack bar sales are 1/3 to 1/2 the amount of ticket sales for the night. It varies mostly depending on the kind of film. More serious films have lower sales. More populist fun movies and most Hollywood Blockbusters are generally termed popcorn movies for a reason. The best sales are usually for kid's movies.

I calculate out how much each person spends at the snack bar on average each week. That varies in much the same way. The average for Twilight was about twice what Changeling did.

However, what exactly is sold to add up to the snack bar sales is almost completely unpredictable. I can almost never discern a pattern when I put the numbers in. We can sell 5 Combo #1 on one night and sell none on another night the same week with about the same number of patrons.

What prompted this post? Tonight we sold 20 small popcorns which may be a record for one night. It was busy but not overly so. However snack bar sales were just over half box office sales which is about normal.

Weird.

New Offerings at Western Film - Nachos

I brought in Nachos a couple months ago, they have been selling pretty good. There's three parts, the trays, the chips and the cheese. I like our chips, they aren't too salty. The cheese comes in small packets like big ketchup packets. One packet fills the cheese portion of the tray. I kinda wish the packets of Cheese were bigger, they are 3 Oz's and to me doesn't look like enough. Maybe I just tend to put a lot of cheese on each chip when I have them myself. We prepare several trays of chips in advance as it takes some time to fill a tray properly. The trays are then put into the warmer pictured. I've told my staff to fill each tray as full as possible using complete chips, pieces are only to be used to fill in any empty spaces.

People who buy Nachos have a choice of cheese or salsa. Most take cheese, the salsa is cheaper so I tell the staff to give them a lot. A second portion of cheese can be bought for $.75 or extra Salsa for $.50. Some people think the cost of the extra cheese is too high but it's actually about what Western Film pays for each packet.

We've actually tried selling Nachos at Western Film before. We had a dispenser with a large bag of cheese inside instead of the small packets. I liked the system better. It was faster and extra cheese could be added easy. However the we didn't sell enough nachos to go through the cheese fast enough and it would go bad. (Hint: if your nacho cheese ever tastes like butterscotch it's too old). Since the cheese is the most expensive part we had to stop selling them.

When I heard about the packets I decided to try them again. Also with the permanent concession stand I had more space for them.

So far we've had good sales so I don't see them going away again.

New offerings at Western Film- Slush Puppie

And by offerings I'm not speaking of the sacrificial kind but more of new products. Until Oct 2007 Western Film's snack bar was on carts and rolled out and put away each night. It was a major pain. However when the USC renovated The Wave restaurant beside Western Film they built us a shiny new concession stand.
Being permanent has allowed me to add new products for a couple reasons. We have more space and the equipment is stable. Something as top-heavy and delicate as a Slush machine would never have survived being rolled around on the carts.

We installed the Slush machine in May and it has been very popular. As usual Western Film always seem to run different from everyone else. The guy who installed it said Blue was the most popular flavour but we seem to sell mostly Red and Green.

Until I asked about getting one I never knew how a slush machine worked. It's a neat idea. We buy the base from Slush Puppie. It's basically flavoured liquid sugar. We mix a certain amount of base with water and put it into the machine. The machine has a refrigeration unit that drops the temperature of the tubs below the freezing level of water. However the freezing temp of the base is lower because of the sugar so it doesn't freeze. As the water freezes the rotors stir the mixture to keep the frozen water crystals from forming a solid chunk of ice.

I'm curious to see how it sells during the school year, it won't be as warm outside but there will be more students around.

An interesting study that states the obvious about concession prices v.s. ticket prices.

Without the high price of popcorn at the concession counter, the price of tickets would be a lot higher, according to a study by the University of California Santa Cruz and Stanford University. Today's (Wednesday) San Jose Mercury News reported that the researchers studied data from 43 multiplex theaters in 30 cities over a five-year period and determined that the concession stand in effect subsidizes relatively low ticket prices and that without it, the ticket prices would rise 25 percent.

This is especially true in cases of cheaper theatres that have a more price sensitive audience.

It's really important for Western Film. A 10% provincial Entertainment tax would kick in if we raised our ticket price even a penny. We would have to go straight from $4.20 to about $5.00 but only make about 25 cents extra ourselves.

With the minimum wage going up significantly we might have to raise concession prices. I'm hoping not.