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This topic comprises 2 pages: 1 2
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Author
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Topic: Single screen - credit card fees
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Frank Angel
Film God
Posts: 5305
From: Brooklyn NY USA
Registered: Dec 1999
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posted 07-11-2018 04:03 AM
Frank, that is beautiful old school -- and it did in fact work for half century and we all did quite nicely with it -- ah, the fun of the old box office statements -- but it has one big drawback (if you want to discount the research that says you lose customers and revenue by not giving patrons the convenience of using their plastic) and that is, YOU do that math in your head, YOU can figure out your net in your head, YOU and your BRAIN are the system. And what that means is, your system is in jeopardy anytime you get sick or have a family emergency or just want a feakin day off; whenever you are forced to put someone else at the helm, even for one day, your "system" goes with you.
The advantage of an automated system is that a particularly knowledgeable human is not essential for its smooth functioning; automation allows you to swap out humans with little or no impact on efficiency. You can pretty easily teach almost anyone how to push the buttons in half an hour; it would take much longer, if you could at all, teach someone to do what you do in your head.
Then there is just the simple factor of fighting the wave, which actually now has become a huge rip current of people simply not wanting to deal with cash. Without selling tickets online and having scanners read tickets the customer has print at home or has as a QR code on their smartphonee which the scanners read at the door, we would simply lose customers in droves.
But I can tell you it does have its downside; the big hit is efficiency. As popular as that technology has become, it can be a nightmare at the ticket-taker line when someone either can't find their printed ticket or their home 10 year old printer renders an unreadable barcode or they come up to the door and can't get to the right email on their phone with the QR code or worse, found it in line, but as they get up to the ticket taker the screen goes into "save energy" mode and the image goes 1/3rd brightness and the scanner won't read it. I must say, tearing a roll ticket was never a complicated process that you could teach a 10 yr old to do efficiently. You know how many times one of the kids at the door scanning tickets pushed the wrong button on a scanner (a cellphone with a couple dozen buttons on it) and had to come back into the boxoffice to have the thing rebooted and reauthorized)? We have even had the scanner WiFi go down during a show with 1000 people in line -- talk about a tech nightmare.
Then again, you can't go backward with new technology. I just bought a Honda Civic Sport. After carefully arranging about 30 CDs in the center console for our summer trip, much to my dismay I discovered that it has no CD player. I was told CDs are "old" technology and I needed to "get with" the modern times. Yah, but I happen to have a substantial CD library. Without trying to be impolite, the salesman basically said, "Tough, old man." Seems they just assume EVERYONE on the planet pays for smartphone service. Everyone who is silly enough to still own CD is expected to transfer hundreds of CDs to their iPhones or Smartphones -- THOSE devices the car sound system will play. In fact, it doesn't even have a 3.5mm input jack so your could hook up an outboard device to its sound system. So to enjoy the quite spectacular sound system Honda has put in this car, you are expected to have a cellphone subscription or have a subscription to SiriusXM radio; the only "free" music source available is FM radio. Ever drive across country and try to find classical music on the broadcast band? Point being, they are not marketing that motor car (how's THAT for an antiquated expression) to old farts like me...you know, old schoolers. To which I say, ![[fu]](graemlins/fu.gif) Honda, and the car you drove in on.
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Marcel Birgelen
Film God
Posts: 3357
From: Maastricht, Limburg, Netherlands
Registered: Feb 2012
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posted 07-11-2018 04:46 AM
quote: Frank Angel
Then there is just the simple factor of fighting the wave, which actually now has become a huge rip current of people simply not wanting to deal with cash. Without selling tickets online and having scanners read tickets the customer has print at home or has as a QR code on their smartphonee which the scanners read at the door, we would simply lose customers in droves.
The simple solution for this is to send those people to a self-service kiosk, info stand or the box office, where they or somebody else can retrieve a copy of his/her booking and print it on a new ticket.
Fit your kiosk with a QR-code scanner so people can already test if their code works before joining the line.
There will still be individual problem cases and people giving you a hard time, but it will help in getting down your waiting times at the gates.
quote: Frank Angel
THOSE devices the car sound system will play. In fact, it doesn't even have a 3.5mm input jack so your could hook up an outboard device to its sound system. So to enjoy the quite spectacular sound system Honda has put in this car, you are expected to have a cellphone subscription or have a subscription to SiriusXM radio; the only "free" music source available is FM radio.
Software like iTunes still allows you to import your CDs. Those CDs can be put on your mobile phone or stuff like an iPod. Your car sure will support Bluetooth audio. I've been playing music in cars this way for at least 10 years now.
The CD is indeed a pretty inefficient medium and I never liked it for in-car use. Your library takes up half your car and if you have a CD changer, it's usually located somewhere in the trunk of your car. I switched to the rather unpopular mini-disc format as soon as it became available for in-car use. It was already a big room-saver.
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Bobby Henderson
"Ask me about Trajan."
Posts: 10973
From: Lawton, OK, USA
Registered: Apr 2001
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posted 07-11-2018 12:18 PM
The civic club I'm in recently ran the beer tent at a 4th of July event. One of our volunteers had a credit card reading system set up through her phone. It was kind of a pain in the ass. It was not easy or fast to handle transactions and she was often having to key in a bunch of stuff on her phone. So that really slowed down traffic in one of the lines. We had another register that was strictly cash-only. Anyway, having at least some credit card capability made the difference on whether some people bought anything at our tent at all. Hopefully we'll have a much better credit card reading setup at the next event.
Credit card systems are increasingly necessary for movie theaters. And movie goers are getting pushed into using credit/debit cards more. If you're going to buy a ticket at a reserved seat theater you need to buy in advance online. Sometimes you have to show the card you used online at the theater to verify the purchase.
Some people just don't carry any cash on them at all, even for buying nickle and dime items such as a $4 can of beer. I hate to generalize, but the younger the adult is the more he's going to be using plastic to purchase. There's at least one or more liquor stores and other businesses in my town that have a $10 minimum order for credit card-based purchases. Some gas stations charge a few cents per gallon more when a credit card is used.
I'm not against credit card use, but credit cards are a financial slippery slope. And that's especially true when there is more than one spender living under the same roof. I use cash whenever possible. I don't carry balances on credit cards; they're paid in full each statement. I have an intense hatred for how they count interest (recompiled and compounded daily), so fuck those interest payments. I don't know how people with thousands or tens of thousands in credit card debt can keep from going insane. I'm not digging myself into that kind of hole if I can help it. One step is not running up the balance by all kinds of mindless "blow and go" purchasing.
***
Regarding the car stereos and CD players, a bunch of the USB memory sticks have capacities big enough to hold many albums of CD quality audio. I have my entire CD collection ripped in LPCM WAV quality to a couple different external hard drives. I can dub whatever albums I want for a road trip pretty quickly. The only downside is the car stereos don't know how to pay WAV files, MP3 or AAC files with gap-less playback. Some albums, such as Pink Floyd: The Wall might have to be made into just a few song files with no breaks so the transitions aren't botched.
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Marcel Birgelen
Film God
Posts: 3357
From: Maastricht, Limburg, Netherlands
Registered: Feb 2012
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posted 07-11-2018 06:05 PM
quote: Bobby Henderson
I'm not against credit card use, but credit cards are a financial slippery slope. And that's especially true when there is more than one spender living under the same roof. I use cash whenever possible. I don't carry balances on credit cards; they're paid in full each statement. I have an intense hatred for how they count interest (recompiled and compounded daily), so fuck those interest payments. I don't know how people with thousands or tens of thousands in credit card debt can keep from going insane. I'm not digging myself into that kind of hole if I can help it. One step is not running up the balance by all kinds of mindless "blow and go" purchasing.
The answer here is a debit card hooked to a bank account that can't go below zero. ![[Wink]](wink.gif)
But yes, people tend to spend more money when paying with any kind of "virtual" money, compared to cold hard cash. I guess it's still a thing, holding e.g. $500 worth of cash in your hand, compared to a simple "swipe" where those same $500 never physically passed hands.
But, I've got a pretty interesting Debit MasterCard now that I can put a daily limit on. I recently gotten the same type of card for a bunch of people working for me. In order to avoid mindless spending on the cards, I put a hard daily limit on it and it worked like a charm.
quote: Frank Cox
But I still don't accept cards at my theatre.
What would it take to effectively change your mind?
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Jesse Crooks
Film Handler
Posts: 22
From: Doylestown, PA, United States
Registered: Mar 2016
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posted 07-11-2018 07:28 PM
Square is great. I've configured a number of POS systems for our theaters and for other businesses over the years, and it is by far the easiest to set up and use. I hate our current POS software and have daydreamed about dumping them for Square, but the niche ticketing functions required for a theater make that impossible for us. Running one theater with a single screen, I'd be tempted.
My suggestion for integrating them would be to add a custom tender type to your current POS software so that you can track which transactions were processed through Square. That way the POS will tell you the correct amount of cash to expect at the end of the night, and you can run reports for the POS software and Square to make sure the value of credit card sales matches.
The simplest method to run cards with Square would be to enter custom values every time, as you would if you were using a card reader with an old manual cash register. To do it cheaply you could buy a refurbished iPod Touch or a cheap Android phone. Note that you will have to buy the a Square chip reader for every terminal, which cost $49.
If you wanted to, say use the current POS software for ticketing and Square for concession (assuming you have dedicated sales stations and don't have to sell tickets from concession), you'd want to get a tablet. That would allow you to set up a grid layout for your items instead of selecting items from an alphabetized list, which is all a phone/iPod could do. Square does let you track inventory as well.
Square even does payroll, although I haven't used that feature myself. We use a third-party payroll company that you clock in to online, and most of our staff uses the iPod we use for scanning online ticket sales to do so, so I imagine that having your staff clock in using the device you use for Square would work pretty well.
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Carl Martin
Phenomenal Film Handler
Posts: 1424
From: Oakland, CA, USA
Registered: Feb 2002
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posted 07-12-2018 04:20 AM
i can't say i hold too high an opinion of square. i have a side-hustle delivering cookies (the baked kind, nothing to do with web browsers). the company decided at one point to switch to square for payroll, which of course entailed that all the couriers agree to square's terms. i actually read through them, and among other possibly objectionable things, square required that we abide by NACHA's rules. as i understand it, these are the rules by which banks shuffle around money. and you have to be a bank to see what these rules are. that's right, even though we had no access to these rules, we had to agree to them! i pointed this out to the cookie company, expecting that i'd have to find another side gig. to my surprise, they decided not to go with square after all.
yay cookie company!
fuck square.
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