Film-Tech Forum ARCHIVE: What Is the Worst Thing from the Customers Point of View About Your Theatre?

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Posted by Bill Enos (Member # 440) on 02-01-2006, 07:15 PM:

In our theatre, no doubt about it----the seats and it will be about a year before they're rebuilt.

Posted by Steve Guttag (Member # 268) on 02-01-2006, 08:05 PM:

Bill...it isn't just the seats...it is the seat-back to seat-back spacing at the Byrd. They killed my knees!

Posted by Monte L Fullmer (Member # 2797) on 02-01-2006, 08:57 PM:

...just that narrow gauge that the palaces used when they were built.

When the only other cinema in town is a stadium complex, a few docomplain of our sloped floor seating, seats that don't have the lift-up armrests, smallish flat screens, optical stereo sound (in two houses), and close to first run concession prices for a 2 buck, 6 screen.

-Monte

Posted by Bill Enos (Member # 440) on 02-01-2006, 09:38 PM:

With seat row spacing there is a mojor issue in most large sloped auditoriums, there ar multiple angles on the floor. Ours has 4. If seats intended to mounted on a particular angle are put on a different angle they are extremely uncomfortable,,rangling from sliding you forward to tilting back enough to make your neck hurt. Eliminating a row doesn't work without completely redoing the floor. What will be done here is to make the backs which are now 6" thick 2 1/2" thick, thus gaining the difference in knee room. Seats also range in width from 18" to 22" in some rows in order to keep the row ends even while the aisles taper from nearly 5 feet to just under 4 ft in width. A new seat plan costs about $40,000, or more.

Posted by Mike Blakesley (Member # 26) on 02-01-2006, 10:45 PM:

Our worst feature by far, no doubt is our restrooms. (Mark Gulbrandsen can vouch for that too!) This place was built before concession stands were common, and it featured a ladies room (with one toilet) as a "convenience," but no men's room.

In 1953, the concession stand was installed and therefore a men's room was required by law, so a broom closet was converted. It's only about 20 square feet and has a urinal, but no toilet or sink. We offer free "moist towelettes" to any dudes that need them, and we converted the ladies room into a unisex room so men needing toilets would be acommodated. On top of everything else, neither room is wheelchair accessible.

The situation sucks bigtime, but our lobby area is so small that there's no way to improve it with the space we have. People are used to it and we get no complaints...in fact it's a fun conversation starter when new people come in.

Posted by Mark Lensenmayer (Member # 134) on 02-02-2006, 07:07 AM:

While I find the ads before the trailers very annoying (especially when you see them over and over), the most annoying thing I've encountered lately is darkness.

The local Marcus and AMC theatres are VERY dark between films. It is very hard to see where you are going and it is easy to trip or bang one's knees while walking to a seat. At a screening last Sunday at AMC Lennox of MATCH POINT, it was very difficult to navigate. And this was in one of the monstro-rooms with very high stadium seating, so even getting to the middle of the house required climbing a lot of steps.

One other problem with these monstro-rooms that you youngin's don't realize is that these rooms are so high that one is actually looking DOWN at the screen, and those of us with the dreaded bi-focals have to keep our heads in a most uncomfortable position.

Posted by John Pytlak (Member # 331) on 02-02-2006, 10:13 AM:

quote: Mark Lensenmayer
One other problem with these monstro-rooms that you youngin's don't realize is that these rooms are so high that one is actually looking DOWN at the screen, and those of us with the dreaded bi-focals have to keep our heads in a most uncomfortable position.

I still much prefer a well-designed sloped auditorium to the really high stadium ones. Fortunately, since I like to sit close at about 2 times the image height from the screen, I usually am not in the "nosebleed section" of the seating, and most stadiums have a level view of the center of the screen from that closer distance.

Fortunately, I don't wear bifocals, and I still have no trouble with stairs, but I feel sorry for those who do and have no choice but a steep stadium theatre.

Posted by Steve Scott (Member # 630) on 02-02-2006, 10:47 AM:

During busier holidays we'll get some suburbanites or non-occasional patrons that suggest, "You should have stadium seating..." Sure, if the booth wasn't directly behind the auditorium... Or did you just not notice where those moving pictures come from? [Roll Eyes]

Posted by Gracia L. Babbidge (Member # 582) on 02-02-2006, 11:21 AM:

Hmm... We get many random comments from our customers, but probably the complaint we hear most frequently is about parking.

We're in a small mall, and the parking lot really isn't adequate, but there's no way to expand it.

There are a few municipal parking lots relatively close by, but some of our patrons don't want to have to walk a couple of blocks from where they park. Nevermind that if they went to the multiplex across town, and had to park near the back of the lot, the distance that they would have to walk is about the same. [Roll Eyes]

We do also get the occasional quip about having just one title at a time. Well ... having only one screen does put some limitations on what we can do - not every single film we bring in needs four shows a day, but sometimes we aren't allowed to split them.

It's been a while since we had a split - tomorrow begins our third week with Capote, before that we had Pride & Prejudice for five weeks, before that we had Good Night And Good Luck for five or six weeks! ...I was so familiar with the audio at the ends of the reels, I almost didn't have to look at the screens to do the changeovers by the end of the runs on the latter two! [Wink]

Posted by Steve Scott (Member # 630) on 02-02-2006, 11:58 AM:

Ditto on the parking. The street we are located on has its meters enforced Sunday-Saturday 6 AM-midnight, 365 days-a-year. The city of Minneapolis loves to enforce these kind of stipulations on retail & entertainment zones. People will park out there on weekends or holidays & swear they never see the posted meter hours. But we are also within a city park & the park patrol doesn't take holidays off for damn near ANY of their meters.

The smart ones park behind the mall, where meters are only enforced on weekdays, 8-5.

Posted by Mark Lensenmayer (Member # 134) on 02-02-2006, 01:39 PM:

Jeffry Johnson can confirm this, but I believe that the former Centrum in Cleveland had a policy for awhile of filling the meters outside the theatre as a service to patrons.

Posted by Jim Ziegler (Member # 86) on 02-02-2006, 10:33 PM:

Didn't some old woman some where get arrested for filling other people's meters?

Posted by Adam Fraser (Member # 1074) on 02-05-2006, 01:10 AM:

To customers the biggest problems probably are:

- Small bathrooms, the ladies room does get a pile up on busy nights,. Theatre was built in 1941 when concessions were an afterthought as Mike said.

- Only playing one film, no matinees, why dont you have more screens?