Sometime around late ’13 to early ’14 I was tasked with looking into upgrading the menu boards above Winnetka’s concessions with digital panels. AMC had switched over to digital menus years before but we at Pacific were still working with magnets and statics. It was honestly kind of embarrassing. The official reason was so we could maintain a more traditional atmosphere, but the real reason was because the Pacifics were on the selling block and we didn’t get any spending without some real begging. Upgrades only happened when they needed to happen just to maintain the sellability of the buildings.
This isn’t just a really funny review, it’s also the exact customer mindset we were up against, after years of the building not spending a single penny to keep up with the times and customer expectations. If the customer is always right, then so was this guy!
Anyway, we had a vendor who’d upgraded the menus at the Grove, upgrading Winnetka became my project. The vendor on the other hand had bigger ideas and I’d outgrown single-site projects years before. So the assigned menu upgrade at Winnetka grew to include the additional installation of 2 media kiosks and a multi-screen video wall in the lobby. And menus and kiosks at Northridge. And menus and kiosks at Lakewood.
Now, the menus were just a cost, to be potentially offset down the line with incorporated advertising of our partner brands. The kiosks and video wall however were just straight revenue, in a partnership with a known and entirely legit vendor. A few hundred dollars every quarter for the kiosks, a few thousand every quarter for the wall.
The project was to set up a negotiated expense for a single location, what Pacific got was roughly $10K a year in pure profit, spread between three of its neediest locations.
Not every win was an epic tale of overcoming adversity. Sometimes I had the latitude to simply do my thing.