Choose Your Seat Theater Might Be Running a Scam

I saw the new Bond movie, Quantum of Solace, this past Saturday night. I usually would not attempt to see a movie during the opening weekend fearing the huge crowds and the potential for getting a seat that would make my neck hurt for weeks to come. This Saturday night was going to be different because I bought my seats at the Cinema De Lux in White Plains, NY where I was able to select which seats I sit in, and therefore am guaranteed to have a good seat in the theater. Or so I thought.

Amazingly, the seats were double booked. I say “amazingly” because I’m so amazed that the theater could think that double booking seats would work out to their benefit. The comparison of double booking can be made to the airline industry. With the airline industry, however, you can expect some people to not show up. People miss their flights. It’s expected. And there may very well be seats available in first or business class that you can use to accommodate for the double-bookings. In a theater, when you purchase an actual seat, what are the chances that you’re going to miss a movie? Have you ever heard of someone pre-ordering tickets to a movie and then missing it? It’s not the norm. And there isn’t an upgrade you can offer me to make it all better.

After speaking with the managers there, they told us we can try to find seats together in the 10:30 PM showing that was being let in at the time and we could discuss the situation after the movie is over. We found seats that were fairly close up which were uncomfortable to watch the movie from. We did want to see the movie so we decided to stay.

After the movie was over, we spoke to the new manager (different shift) and he told us that since we saw the movie, there was nothing he could do. We argued our point and after some teeth-pulling (that’s what it felt like) he eventually agreed to give us eight free passes to a future movie (he tried four free passes for a while. Like that makes any sense.). What did he count as eight free passes? A piece of paper with his signature and the number eight. Like that was going to work. And even if it did work, what are the chances that all eight of us would go back to the movies together anytime soon (I mean, all to the same movie and time)? So, we complained and finally got the eight free passes we deserved (actually, we deserved a full refund, but I digress).And now, every person who we told about this great theater where you can reserve your seats is hearing from us again about how this theater is ripping off their customers by making them think they have seats but are actually double booking these seats. It’s a scam and practically theft.

So let’s recap. The City Center 15: Cinema De Lux in White Plains, NY is double-booking seats. And unlike other theaters that oversell theaters, this theater is double booking a specific seat. They don’t apologize when you get screwed (that’s right, no one apologized) and they try to brush you off when you complain. Customer service was just plain bad and now that impression of the theater will be spread throughout my community by me and my friends. This should be a lesson to all companies. Don’t try to screw your customers. We talk to others and will make sure that everyone we know finds out about your shady practices.

40,000 Songs Per Child

I remember my music collection as a young teenager. It mainly consisted of CDs that I got from signing up to Columbia House or BMG’s CD delivery service. I had more CDs than most of my friends. I’d say my total collection was about 50 CDs. That’s roughly 600 songs. That wouldn’t even fill up a 10GB iPod.

Now you have people of all ages carrying around over 50 GB in their pocket. Apple’s 80 GB iPod stores 40,000 songs! Please remember this when the music industry gives you their sob story about how their losing business because of piracy. They brought it upon themselves for reaping the profits of this mass consumption of their product without listening to their consumers (Apple had to pull teeth to get them to charge $1 a song). They could have avoided their current losses if they actually provided the consumers what they wanted ten years ago when MP3s were becoming popular.

Note to TV and movie studios: Make your content as accessible as possible and sell advertising (like what you’re doing with Hulu). Don’t make the same mistake as the music industry and try to milk the consumer for as long as possible.

Information Overload

I saw Iron Man this weekend. I definitely recommend the movie, but this is not a review. The part of the movie that got me thinking the most was the previews. The good previews are the ones that give us a brief explanation of the story without giving away any plot twists or the ending. The bad movie preview is the one where they give us a recap of the entire movie so you know the basic beginning, middle, and end, without having to see the movie. In other words, there is a formula and this movie follows it. Now while I like to see good movies, I like to see bad movie previews. The reason being, is that usually bad movie previews are for bad movies. And now I know the whole movie plot, so I don’t need to see it to know what happens.

I think the average person is expected to absorb more information now than ever in history. Because of the ease of finding information, we’re exposed to more information, and thereby required to know more to be accepted. Whether it is in a social setting or business setting, you’ve got to have mental access to lots of info.

So how do we deal with this information requirement? Blogs have helped. They’ve consolidated important news into niche chunks that we can absorb in small segments and get overall knowledge of an industry or topic. RSS feed readers have helped consolidate the blogs into one central location but it’s still a challenge to absorb all this information. I think the answer lies in the formula. Movies have formulas. Why can’t other types of mental input have formulas as well. I think to some degree they do, and it’s important that bloggers, or other information-deliverers, use the bad movie preview approach when delivering this information. By providing us with our the overall gist of a concept that we can fit into a standard mental formula, then we can extrapolate information from the post without reading it. That would save time and provide a mechanism to improve memory retention.

I think I’ve developed a mental formula for the majority of Techcrunch posts which talk about Web 2.0 companies. That allows me to skim them and still retain the information (most of the time). I’m not sure if this mental formula can be created for any type of medium after repeated use. What I do know is that this formula creation is extremely important for my own personal knowledge absorption.