No Added Value

I went to the movies last night (The Dark Knight is way too dark for me by the way).

A bottle of water and a choc top to enjoy in the cinema cost me about a gazillion dollars from the snacks counter in the foyer.

Throughout the movie I was seriously disturbed by the crinkling, crunching and crackling of packets of food and the eaters who munched through their contents.

Why do we pay four times as much for a bottle of water or a packet of chips or an ice cream in a cinema? Is it just because we are a captive audience? (From a practical point of view it is because I so frequently forget to buy something at a normal store on the way to the cinema - curses!).

I could understand paying more if the cinemas had some sort of value adding proposition, for example, cinema food with noiseless packaging which doesn't crinkle and disturb other patrons. But they don't - the food is the same as you can buy outside the cinema. I could understand it if the business model in cinemas is one where you don't pay for the tickets but instead pay through the nose for the food (and maybe this is the model - maybe cinema tickets should be $30 each if we didn't pay ridiculous prices for food and drink - but if so they aren't very good at communicating this to we poor customers) - but this doesn't seem to be the case.

So, the only conclusion to draw seems to be that cinemas are taking the piss and gouging us. Why-oh-why would they do this? Because they can, and because we all mutely put up with it.

More power to them! But what a missed opportunity to add value and build loyal customers instead of annoyed ones.