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Well, yes, of course having a tech on is worth it if the tech has something to do. That's how jobs work. The problem for the cinema is whether or not the tech h
by hug 7y ago
Well, yes, of course having a tech on is worth it if the tech has something to do. That's how jobs work. The problem for the cinema is whether or not the tech has something to do often enough that his salary is less than the refunds they have to make if he doesn't exist. Your parent post is suggesting that the cinema has done the math and said "fuck it, that doesn't happen often enough that we care".
You can't determine whether the cinema lost money on the film: You know that some people received refunds, which means the movie made less money than it could have, but you have no data on whether or not half the patrons kept watching and still paid. (And even then no data on whether or not that covers costs. Maybe they all bought huge buckets of popcorn, a higher margin product, that they didn't refund.)
We also don't have an estimate on how frequently this goes wrong, although we can guess that the frequency is low enough that the chain doesn't see the need to keep techs on -- and, in fact, the previous technical role of the projectionist been largely eliminated.
- leetcrew 7y agoI'm guessing it's worth just not paying an on-site technician and giving refunds whenever a problem happens. back of the envelope calculation. say you have a multiplex with five theaters, and each theater (200 seats, 50% full on average) cycles a movie every three hours. you're open from noon to midnight. a ticket costs $10 and a cinema tech costs $20/hr, so $240 a day just for one. your average seating brings 200 * 0.5 * $10 = $1000 of revenue from ticket sales (I'm assuming you don't refund popcorn). from a first-order analysis, it doesn't make sense to hire the on-premises tech unless the movie equipment malfunctions in at least one showing every four days (or once per 80 showings). to me, that sounds like a pretty high failure rate, but I don't actually know anything about cinema equipment. I'd guess that if your stuff malfunctioned that often, people would get pretty mad even if the tech intervened. obviously I neglected a few things here. maybe that one theater will continue to malfunction throughout the rest of the day, forgoing more revenue. maybe even if the tech intervenes after five minutes, people ask for a refund anyway. maybe your reputation gets so bad that you have to start giving concessions vouchers along with the refund to get people to come back.