“No Outside Food” At Movie Theaters Is A Racist Policy.

Posted On 2024-08-02

It just is.

There was an article in The Guardian about movie theater pricing that triggered some PTSD flashbacks. The sensationalism of the theater economy slowly collapsing is fun to watch and makes for a better show, but it’s always worth shining a light on how theater companies can be a destructive player in communities, and are kinda due for a reckoning anyway.

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“No outside food* is – at the markups theaters charge – absolutely a classist policy.

Insofar as class is still inextricably tied to race, it is also therefore absolutely a racist policy.

If you’ve never managed a ‘no outside food’ theater in a poor part of town, you have no valid expertise. Sorry, you just don’t. It’s a faceless corporate policy that forces trauma into entertainment for no reason beyond money.

I was in Culver City with Pacific Theaters when the Magic Johnson theater closed down for renovations. Culver City is a town with money, the Crenshaw home of the Magic Johnson was not. The Magic Johnson had been purpose-built for the lower-income neighborhood, to provide those audiences with the moviegoing experience they had been economically/geographically frozen out of. So when the MJ closed, those people had no comparable option left, at all.

So our business was booming thanks to the many lower-income Black folks who a) had nowhere else to go with their local theater closed, and b) were already paying more for the trip and the higher ticket prices that come from being in a town with money. Pacific Theaters had an absolute ‘no outside food’ policy at the time. There wasn’t even discussion on how to manage exceptions when they slipped through the ticket taker, exceptions were not on the table. (Personnel were even trained to narc on one another. Projection staff were barred from bringing outside food into staff-only QC screenings.)

And I remember the day one guest pushed back too hard, and refused to cave in any way over the food she’d snuck in. And I remember standing there – the white manager standing up in the middle of the sold-out almost all-Black audience – directing the armed police officers to accost a 50-something Black woman for the crime of not wanting to spend $6 for a hot dog (and this was maybe 12 years ago, I don’t even want to know how much they cost now). The level and variety of trauma my rule-following had possibly put in play for this woman slowly settled over me as I stood there. It wasn’t some un-bought hot dog that was crushing the goodwill of that whole room towards the work I was supposed to be doing. It was my instructed response that was undoing the short and fast lines I’d been able to provide those hundreds, it was my own employer undoing the clean and seamless film experience my staff were about to present them.

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There was one occasion with AMC where I was ashamed to be an AMC manager, and one with Pacific. That day was the Pacific occasion. With a full understanding of the policy, it’s intended impact on he business and the intended manner in which we were to present it to the guests, I never enforced it with any guests to any of my buildings after that day. In our here and now, the overlap between class and race can’t be dismissed. Just look at the reality WHERE that lower-income movie theater was built, and WHO cared enough to built it. “No outside food” may carry economic fringe benefits, but it remains a racist policy in impact.

That $10 bag of popcorn? Costs the theater maybe 50¢, tops. McDonald’s can sell large sodas for $1.50 and survive; your $7 movie drink is just robbery.

And there’s no reason why exhibitors can’t negotiate better terms with studios. That business is completely backwards. The studio cut has gotten higher as release windows have shortened, with the studios turning the screws even tighter for the bigger releases to maximize their cut. So of course this squeezes the concession operation for more revenue. But there’s no reason for theatres to just roll over in the first place! As much as film rent contracts depend on the premise that the exhibitors need content, the release windows force studios to depend just as heavily on exhibitors for screens. Studios can’t afford to shut out screens up front when they’re not going to be able to make up the revenue later in the run, when that later doesn’t happen anymore. And they still need to pad that opening gross as much as possible, so they can’t afford to shut out major exhibitors. This is leverage that theaters have squandered for YEARS. If AMC or even Regal presented Disney with the possibility of losing thousands of screens from a Marvel tentpole due to rental terms, you think Disney would just walk away from all that money?

I got out before Covid, so commentary on the economics of the business may not be fully current any longer. Industry reporting is not an accurate barometer, Deadline and Hollywood Reporter were pushing the line about a 50% revenue split between exhibitors and theaters long after the figure had faded into history. That said, watching AMC get saved by stock trolls and then routing those millions directly into the CEO’s checking account, one struggles to assume logic and reason have returned to the underlying structure of the business.

AMC used to be involved in a feud with Paramount. I have no idea why, but the consequence of the feud was that Paramount refused for years to screen their product at AMC’s then-premiere Century City venue. This just meant that AMC Burbank had a guaranteed win over Century for any Paramount weekends, because it was only the Century City location Paramount was willing to cede. Yet even years later there has been so little real learning in exhibition, the narrative is still about beholden theaters being some kind of victims. Why journalists insist on carrying water for the studios, or why exhibitors insist on settling for less, is a mystery. But The Guardian’s framing from within that status quo ignores a deeper and simpler story, that these policies are simply confrontational and anti-consumer.

Theaters in my experience have been pretty consistent about referring to their customers as “guests”. We were welcoming these people into our business for a shared experience that we were hosting; they were guests. It is paradoxical then – and largely unreported – how consistently theaters insist on mistreating their welcomed guests.

The guest that smuggles a $2 Coke because they can’t easily afford a $5 Coke can’t suddenly easily afford a $5 Coke just because some automaton in a cheap dress-code suit wants them to. Confronting them produces NO net benefit! Maybe, maybe they bite the bullet and spend the money in that moment for a concession snack and the theater gets those extra dollars. But you’ve forced your ‘welcome guest’ to have an unpleasantly expensive experience on your watch, at the expense of an unpleasantly cheap life when your hosted experience ends. You’ve also placed them in the embarrassing position of being publicly poor, and along the way likely shamed them in front of loved ones and complete strangers for the indignity of not being loaded. You will be lucky to ever see that customer again.

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And AMC used to do math on this very subject. I used to be one the trainers for new hires, I had this stuff down. For every guest who complains, there are ~20 who say nothing. AMC’s own math says that for every ‘welcome guest’ they openly alienate, they quietly alienate 20 others. Are those squeezed-out concession dollars worth them being the last sales you’ll ever make to those customers?

As a new hire to the business, we were trained simply. Sorry, I know the prices are high, but this is our house and you don’t bring your McDonald’s into a Burger King to eat it. That was the line; we were a restaurant, restaurants only thrived from exclusivity, it was simple economics. But have you ever actually brought a Whopper into a McDonalds? You know what happens? Nothing. Nothing at all. You know why? Because even the folks at McDonalds tend to have more sense about the virtues of not being the food police, and the value of not being the fun police.