Response to comment.

This comment was left on one of the Next Week posts:

Star Trek, then Night at the Museum.... I feel like I just watched their trailers on cable tv. What allows movies like these to come to campus so quickly?(I'm thinking the answer is likely either my lack of a sense of time or something to do with the industry. Perhaps they were set up from the start to quickly be put up for sale on DVD?)

During the summer the high number of new blockbusters released tend to push films off faster than at other times of year. When Harry Potter opens on 4 of the 12 screens in a multiplex they have to drop something to make room. It also depends on the film. Something like Transformers 2 is heavily front loaded, it will have made about half it's total gross on opening weekend. It won't play more than few weeks first run. It's also a long film so that encourages theatres to drop it as long movies make less money since fewer showings can be done in a day.
On the other hand there are films like Up and The Hangover. Hit kid's films like UP tend to drop down to matinees only and play for a couple months. The theatres like the 3-D ones as they can charge extra. A movie like the Hangover is one of those occasional word of mouth hits that just keep chugging along. Recent examples were Juno and Wedding Crashers. Hangover has had some of the lowest week to week drops in grosses of recent memory. A big action film will typically drop 50-60% in it's second week. The Hangover has been dropping only about 20% a week. I'm planning to play it during Frosh Week but there is a possibility I might not be able to get it by then.

The DVD window is now about 4 months so that doesn't come into play except for the occasional film that's still playing in theatres when it comes out of DVD. Regular readers of this blog will probably be able to guess which studio tends to do this the most...Fox.

Response to a comment.

This comment was left on on older post so I thought I'd respond here.

I know I'm kind of late to comment on this post but out of curiosity, do you get customers at the concession stand who are not going to see a movie that night? Not sure if this is something you can/do track. I just imagine there may be students in the UCC who just want a snack.

Yes, we sell a fair amount of stuff to people who aren't going to the movies. We sell a fair amount of popcorn to people studying or meeting in the building.

We stock some items just to sell to the general public. Red Bull and Rockstar are generally bought by studying students. We sell quite a bit during exams.

This is partly because we run at night. The variety store downstairs closes early some nights and isn't open at all on the weekends so we are the only place to buy some stuff except for vending machines.

During the summer we are the only place open at night at all on the entire campus except for the Grad Club so we get a lot of customers looking for food. We sell hot dogs during the summer only for this reason. Hot dogs are about the only thing I could come up with. Anything else like sandwiches have too short a shelf life for us to sell at a reasonable price.

At one point I planned to turn the concession stand into a mini variety store and carry things like gum but dropped the idea once I checked into it further.
For things like gum there's too many varieties and I wouldn't be able to carry very many. Plus I hate gum, it should be banned if people don't stop sticking it to everything.
Things like Potato Chips would cannibalize popcorn sales.
Pretty much everything else a variety store sells that we didn't already sell I didn't think we would sell enough of to get around shelf life restrictions.