Cineplex employee wipes down a ticket touch screen at a theatre in Toronto as part of health and safety protocols put in place at Cineplex movie screens, on Oct. 6, 2020.Chris Young/The Canadian Press
Corey Mintz is the author of The Next Supper: The End of Restaurants as We Knew Them, and What Comes After.
Did you even notice when Cineplex CGX-T started charging an extra $1.50 for each ticket purchased online? I had been paying this for a year, unaware of the change. If it feels like Canada’s biggest movie exhibitor is being sneaky with those fees, the Competition Bureau agrees. In a case before the Competition Tribunal, a lawyer for the Competition Commissioner describes Cineplex’s method as “drip pricing,” a marketing technique in which “a price is unattainable, because consumers must pay additional charges or fees to buy a product or service.”
The way Cineplex is slipping in the fee does seem underhanded. That’s a shame, given that the service it is charging for is genuinely valuable and arguably worth paying for.
Kids today will never know the terror of having to save seats – sitting alone in a packed theatre, coats thrown over the five chairs next to you, protecting your turf from strangers while your friends bought popcorn and used the restroom. When Cineplex introduced the option to choose seats in advance, we entered a new, better world.
Though merely an added feature of online ticket sales, this eliminated a major moviegoing anxiety. There was no longer any need to save seats or arrive early. For five years, we lived in this utopia. Until 2022, when Cineplex quietly started adding a $1.50 fee for online ticket sales.
Since then, these fees have generated almost $40-million of revenue for Cineplex.
Competition Commissioner Matthew Boswell argues that these fees are a form of deceptive marketing, because consumers don’t see the full price advertised and instead see a ticking clock that pressures them to complete the purchase. The bureau is asking the tribunal to order an end to both practices, in addition to applying a fine. Cineplex dismisses the claims as without merit and defends the practice, “because moviegoers are told about fees they may face from the start of the purchase process.”
I checked that out.
The first mention of an online ticket fee is an ad at the top right of the page for the company’s CineClub rewards membership, which offers “no booking fees.” If I scroll to the very bottom, a note reads “booking fee” and “$0.00,″ with the additional promise that “booking fee is discounted for Scene+ members and waived when you’re a CineClub member.”
The $1.50 booking fee only appears after I scroll back up to select a ticket, then scroll back down. But by then, my focus is distracted by a window at the bottom that starts counting down from five minutes, featuring a subtotal and a button for “continue.” I agree with Mr. Boswell about the countdown. A timer is always going to increase pressure. And the “continue” button negates the need to scroll down. This is shady, carnival behaviour.
I get that the business of film exhibition has changed. The one-two punch of streaming and the pandemic clobbered movie theatres. Sales are down. Attendance has not returned to prepandemic levels, with the United States and Canada selling 825 million tickets last year, a 49-per-cent drop from the 1.23 billion sold in 2019. In November, 2023, Cineplex grossed $35-million in Canada, a decrease of 33 per cent from the $52-million in November, 2019.
So I understand why Cineplex would be looking for new sources of revenue.
But I don’t think this is an honest way to do it. And I don’t believe their defence that guests are told about these fees upfront, or that scrolling to the bottom of the page shouldn’t matter because it’s an intrinsic part of using a computer or smartphone.
I worked at Cineplex in the summer of 1993. At the time, each size of popcorn could be had with differing quantities of butter, measured in the number of squirts. Managers encouraged us to upsell by asking, “Would you like a large butter with your medium popcorn?” Though the butter pricing was displayed on menus near the ceiling, we never included the additional charge in the pitch. There was no incentive for employees to increase sales. And guests would get angry at us when they figured out we were pushing a higher-price option without informing them. The online ticket fee is more of this chicanery.
When I’m going to a crowded show, I genuinely love the service of buying advance tickets online and selecting my seats. But if a service has value to consumers, its pricing should be presented honestly and transparently. That means clearly including it with the ticket price, on a single page, without scrolling down, as they do now with the $1.25 price of butter on popcorn.