The Perfect Theater

Alright, Chris. Let's iron out the kinks in what we'd do to run the perfect theater. Here, in no particular order, are the things I'd do (based on your ideas as well as mine that I formed while still working there).
1. Pay Employees More: They're grossly underpaid, from ushers to management. Pay them more, and you'll have happier employees, who smile more and like their job more.
2. Close Theater After 9 to Patrons Under 21, And Serve Beer: This is done (beer serving) at the Franklin Cinema, and is really successful. This makes the theater more grown up seemingly and also drives up revenue to help pay for number one.
3. Don't Book Crap Movies: Now, to a certain extent, this is unavoidable. Studios package their films together saying "You want surefire blockbuster A, then you also have to book surefire dud B." But beyond those restrictions, no booking of crap movies. Serve a better product, get better customers and keep them longer.
4. Charge Reasonable Rates For Concessions: This can only be done if there's new revenue streams such as the beer mentioned in number 2, as well as a few other ideas for new revenue.
5. Book Classic/Older/Cult Hits For Monthly Showings: Older movies are far cheaper to rent from studios...which is why during college the student association always showed older films like Wizard of Oz and such. This is a way to pay cheap for good movies and make more profit when you show them.
6. Locate Theater In Mid-Sized Suburb (such as Franklin or Hendersonville): This gives you a crowd that is cosmopolitan in movie knowledge, but helps avoid big-city trouble aspects of gangs and thugs.
7. All Electronic Box Office Workers: Use kiosks as your ticket sellers. Cut cost on paying wages to ticket sellers by doing it all electronically. Heck, you can card people at the door or in the lobby, so you don't need humans selling tickets for that. Replace with a greeter at the kiosks who greets every customer in a friendly way and aids in instruction on using the kiosks for any customers having trouble.
8. Exit Greeting and Mints: A staff memeber with a bowl of free mints at every exit door of the auditorium as soon as the show lets out. Says goodbye, thanks for coming, etc....and gives a free mint.
9. Great Employee Benefits: Not good ones...great ones. Again, happy employees make good employees.
10. Confiscate cell phones or refund ticket price and ask to leave anyone caught using a cell phone inside a show. Do a survey of movie goers and nearly all will say cell phone use bothers them...and yet so many jerks still do it. Let's weed them out. No cell phones in my utopia theater, thank you very much.
11. No Bad Seats. Take out all seats with obstructed or poor lines of sight. Make it part of the marketing push that there are "no bad seats in the house."
12. Make Me Customer Manager & Chris Operations Manager: Plays to both our strengths. As long as we're discussing the perfect theater, why not run it together, right? I'll deal with the people, you can deal with operations and the booth and such. And we'll both make policy and staff decisions. I've never met a better manager for customer and employee relations than myself (perfect world, remember...so I'm allowed to brag) and I've never met anyone better at quality film presentation than Chris. We're both tough critics for anyone that does either thing poorly.
13. Hire A Hiring Manager: One manger, whose only job is to hire quality people. Send them to training seminars on good hiring practices. The can focus in soley on finding the right people....and leave the theater-running to us.
14. All Concession Lines Open Until All Customers Served. I'm a firm believer that many people skip the concession stand because there wasn't a short enough line. Let's make them lines short and I bet you we inch up our sales per capita a tad bit.
15. Advertise: Theaters today don't advertise...which proves what I was saying in the previous post about how non-customer-focused they are. They let the studios advertise the films. Well let's advertise the theater itself.
16. Giveaways, Contests, & Promotions Out The Whazoo: Every weekend night we give something away. Trust me, it's not hard to get prizes donated from area businesses when you're driving through as much traffic as a theater does....it's just that no one ever does it. From DVD players to Xboxes to cars.....giveaways all the time.
17. Learn Repeat Customer's Names: Speaks for itself here, but if you shake Rodney's hand and say "Welcome back, Rodney" it goes a lot further than nodding at him when he enters and saying "Hello."
18. Hire Lots Of Band Kids: No real scientific research here, but in my experience....high schoolers who are in band make the best employees. Not sure why, even...but it's true. That might be an illegal hiring practice...I'll have to check....but we're doing it.
19. Show Things On Lobby Monitors That People Care About: Not stupid Coke ads....show trailers, show actual DVD's, show the Titan's game...show stuff they want to see, not stuff they want to tune out.
20. Be Honest With Customers: Communicate how theaters work...that revenue comes mostly from concessions...that box office dollars almost all go back to studios....Let them know why we're different and what specifically we're doing to try and make them regular customers. Believe me...most customers like it when they're "regulars" somewhere.
21. Free Movie With Customer Feedback Card (1 per customer). Ask them directly in the survey what would make them want to come back over and over and then do it when practical and possible.
22. No Ugly Chicks Hired: Okay, that one's a joke, just to see if you're even still reading.
23. Hire, Train, & Employ Only People Who Are Capable Of Top-Notch Film Presentation And Understand Why It's Priority Number One: No lazy projector operators. Maybe some sort of quality control ratio like one booth operator for every five projectors or something.

Okay...that's all I got for now. And it was compiled rather hastily. Obviously we're going to spend a little more in this theater than the current theaters do...so we need some new revenue, some of which I tried to account for. The largest source of new revenue would be repeat business and building a loyal customer base. Would love to see what you have to add/detract/change about it, Chris.