Liam McGinley
Creative Section Editor
On Oct. 15, I was made aware that one of my Senior Managers terminated her employment with Cinemark after years of working there and I cannot blame her.
Throughout the years, there has been an increase of people disregarding movie theater etiquette as well as a lack of basic manners. Movie theater workers, especially managers, deal with this on a daily basis. Customers are becoming too comfortable with disrespecting the staff and acting in a way that is inappropriate in a public setting.
One time when I was a cashier, I had a grown man make a scene over popcorn sizes. For context, we charge those ridiculous popcorn prices by the unit/bag. Not by the amount of popcorn inside a unit/bag. This man was trying to get me to charge him the amount of a kid’s snack pack when he had half of a small popcorn bag filled. When I told him I could not do it, he tried to tell me I was wrong and asked to speak to my manager. My manager told him if he wanted to pay for the popcorn at a snack pack price, he would have to buy a snack pack.
Instead of being understanding, the customer yelled at my manager and sternly said that he was not a child to me and my manager’s faces. He was insulted because we told him this. He took our policy as an insult to age when it was not the intention of either of us and he used this as a way to keep arguing with my manager.
Eventually, he decided to switch the small bag for a snack pack. However, when he came to check out, he pouted and did not look me in the eye. Whether he was embarrassed or actually distressed about popcorn sizes, I had no idea, but this was my first instance of seeing how disrespected theatre employees were.
Another instance was when the newer SpongeBob SquarePants Movie came out last winter. Sure, the audience for that movie is mainly kids and kids make messes. However, the messes weren’t even from the kids, it was from the adults. In the top row, there was an entire row of trash left for us to clean in only a couple minutes. It wasn’t even a small mess, it was giant. Every recliner seat was left up, there were bags and bags of trash, the floor had various candies, empty used cups and popcorn spilled all over it. There was no attempt to pick up any of this trash at all. Usually, a popcorn or drink spill every now and then is what I expect when cleaning the auditoriums, but leaving your entire net worth of trash behind is something else entirely. When cleaning, ushers have limited time before the next movie plays and we also have multiple auditoriums to manage. Disregarding all your trash for us to take care puts us at risk of falling behind with cleaning.
I have also noticed that people have gotten way too comfortable in the theater. It started as simple things, like people cutting their nails or removing their socks or shoes. But this summer, one of my coworkers had to clean up a moviegoer’s sperm on the seat. What made this worse was the fact that the moviegoer came back for his phone and said “I was just coming back to clean up my little area.” Then we also had people leave trails of feces in our hallways and family bathroom, as well as many times where I caught people having sex in the bathrooms.
As unbelievable as all this sounds, instances like this have been normalized at my specific theater. I do not know if movie theater employees had similar experiences, but the main point is that people who work in customer service deserve so much better. Behavior like this should not be normal, especially at a movie theater that is made for everyone of every age group. This decrease in movie theater etiquette has made me see the worse sides of humanity and it is not talked about enough.
