Movie Night

I read an article entitled 13 Things A Movie Theater Employee Won't Tell You. My very first paying job was at the now defunct Pentagon City Theatres in Pentagon City Mall back in the 11th grade. Between high school and college I worked at four different theaters, so the article piqued my interest. It was spot on, but it failed to mention half the things that I expected to see. Two of the theaters shut down and the other two were bought by another company, so I don't think I can be sued. I'll just leave out the names of the theaters. Here's my list

#1 If you don't see a popcorn kettle, then more than likely the popcorn isn't fresh.
At all but one theater, we used to pop popcorn ahead of time and keep it in the back on shelves. We had to keep at least thirty 13-gallon trash bags up on the shelf at all times. First in, first out. If I popped it on Monday and business was slow all week, then you probably ate it on Friday. You couldn't tell a difference because those display cases have warm air coming out of the bottom. My job in the morning was to fill the bins in the front, turn on the light and turn on the air warmers. Subsequently, my job at night was to empty the bins and put all the unsold popcorn back in a bag and back on the shelf to be reheated and resold tomorrow.

#2 For the love of God, that isn't butter!
One theater required us to correct customers who asked for butter on their popcorn: We have butter-flavored topping. What does that mean? At the beginning of the day, we go back into the storage room and pull out this gallon jug that looks like the same canola oil bottle you'd get from the grocery store except that stuff was chunky and slightly off colored. We dump that into the big butter dispenser bowl and flip the switch that melts it down. It's some kind of oil, but I have no clue which one. And if you get a whiff of it, it smells nothing like butter. And at the end of the day, we did the same thing that we did with the popcorn...pour the leftover butter back in the container and put it back on the shelf.

#3 Yes, you are being ripped off.
You're being ripped off because the theater is being ripped off. Only a small portion of ticket sales goes to the theater. 90% of their profit is from selling food. That large popcorn that you paid $7 for only cost 15 cents to make. If it were not for the high concession prices you would be watching the movie on a folding chair in a closet.

#4 I don't eat here.
The cleanest theater that I ever worked at required us to remove all of the nozzles from the soda dispensers nightly and soak them in solution. We had to spray the popcorn bins with sanitizer and we disassembled the hot dog and slushee machine components and cleaned them off. That's the cleanest theater. The average one I worked for...I didn't even know half of that stuff could come apart and be cleaned. We used to wipe the outside of the popcorn glass to get the fingerprints off and that was it.

Now the dirtiest theater I ever worked for was also one of the most popular ones. During my first week the shift lead asked me if I was afraid of mice. When I told her no, she added throwing away mice traps to my list of duties. The room with the candy and all the popcorn always had two or three mice on the traps daily. We'd assign the boxes of Raisinettes and Goobers to spoilage when we found gnaw marks going through them. We'd discard the popcorn IF we caught the fact that there was a hole in the bag where they'd been eating it. And you don't even wanna know how many times I found rat droppings in the ice bins. You wouldn't even think that rats would go near an ice bin. The only reason we stayed in business was because the state I worked in didn't do random health inspections. Instead they scheduled them and the night before we all had to stay late to clean up. So no, I don't eat movie food.

The list could go on and on, but we're at 750 words and I try to keep these things as far away from 1000 whenever possible.