Vue Cinemas’s interesting perception of the ‘value’ component of a value meal
Strong sales largely rely on balancing price, profits and demand. Make something too cheap and your revenue will be high (if demand is also high), but you won’t make much profit. Make something too expensive and your profit-per-unit could be high, but you also risk killing demand.
It’s with this thought in mind that I wonder why Vue Cinemas prices food and drink the way it does. It’s not the only chain guilty of gouging a captive audience, but it’s shocking how far the company has gone in recent years. In my local cinema, the ‘value’ meal that comprises a regular popcorn and drink now costs an astonishing eight pounds (roughly the cost of an adult ticket). The chain, naturally, provides a bucket of each product, in order to try and give you the perception of value (i.e. “Wow, that was expensive, but they sure give you a lot!”), but I wonder if people are starting to see through the bullshit.
Of late, it’s increasingly common to see entire audiences without any refreshments at all, bar the odd bottle of overpriced water. It’s clear that the modern cinema is pricing itself out of its own captive market. Additionally, people are being increasingly careful about diet, and so “enough Coke to drown in” doesn’t look as appealing as it perhaps once did.
One curiosity at Vue, though, is its kiddy combo (first noticed by Mrs. G). You get a smallish drink, a smallish amount of popcorn and a candy of some kind. On closer inspection, the amount of popcorn you get still exceeds what you’d find in three small bags in a supermarket multipack, and the candy is typically a ‘fun size’ Milky Way. The cost, though, is—relatively speaking—not too bad: under three quid. What I wonder is why Vue and other chains aren’t recognising that adults en masse would almost certainly buy more smaller portions if they were offered and available for a reasonable price, and the subsequent increase in sales would offset people avoiding the ridiculous ‘value’ meals currently sold.
In the meantime, I’ll continue buying the odd kiddie combo. I don’t have a kid myself, but it’s the only option that’s not totally taking the piss from a pricing standpoint and that isn’t akin to snarfing down enough salt to kill a movie-monster slug and enough sugar to make your teeth explode.
Do you get a free toy?
Depends if you count the card box as a toy or not.
The problem at the Westfield Vue isn’t so much the prices as the fact you’d literally have to turn up an hour before the start time of the film to be able to buy any and still see said film.
Our Vue was a Ster Century, and they wisely retained the cinema’s online seat-booking facility. It’s also a decent cinema, with steep inclines and big screens. Just a pity everything’s such a rip-off.
Oh the Westfield Vue allows you to do everything online.
They just seriously underestimated the number of people serving food you might need for 20+ screens (hint : 5 probably won’t cut it) and then hired the slowest people in the world.
Be interesting to see actual stats on this rather than just the perception hunch that more people are not buying snacks. This may indeed be a case in London but further north queues at food stands are still huge, giving the perception that people are still buying cinema food.
For my sins I worked for odeon part time around my job to pay a little off my mortgage a little while ago. I worked in one ofthe largest odeons in the country and was told by the manager that only the small odeons in small towns ran at profit on tickets alone. Rents and locations coupled with price of films (for the cinema to hire in) meant the majority of cinemas only start to make profits through the food and ice cream etc. This may have been an exaggeration on his part but obviously the cost price of what you are buying is no way near what you actually pay, giving massive profits on food. It was actually better value to purchase gallery tickets and get free food as part of that ticket if you were choosing to eat at the cinema. It would be good to see the truth behind all these though. One thing I did learn from working there is that the companies were quite shrewd in operating on minimal costs, losses and staff wages to maximise profitability. In harder times perhaps the whole industry will need to take on board ideas such as this to survive.