I would of loved to have several million dollars just laying around to build a good theatre in Manhattan, but unfortunately, I'm a few million short.
For the record, I was hired straight to the booth, so I worked up there for four years and management for my last year till I finally graduated.
I think the major difference here is corporate vs locally owned. Our new hires are paid 5.15/hr and likely don't see a raise anytime they work there, if they do get a raise, it's 15 cents an hour or some non-significant amount. Yes the morallity of the staff is pretty futile. There is no hope of a raise and you do is sweat your ass off for a bunch of people bitching about prices you can't control and you get treated like crap to boot.
I'll agree that the staff uniforms suck and some are idiots, but I'm going to disagree with you on the employee professionalism. Yes, they might not be the most professional staff, but we have to work with what we are given. Frankly, if I was going to a movie, I don't care what the staff are doing/what they look like, so long as I get my ticket and they point me in the right direction.
Architecture...again, not the reason I'm going to watch a movie. Sure, it's nice to see the vaulted painted sky cieling or whatever, but honestly, I don't care about the facade. Hopefully I'm not standing around the lobby long enough to give a crap. meh.
Auditoriums--personally I like the new setup that carmike made. It is 100x better than it used to be. Sure it would be nice to have armrests on both sides, larger seats, and extra area, but again, this goes back to local vs. corporate. That crap just isn't going to happen at corporate level, they want as many people as you can pack in there and let me tell you why in a few minutes.
audio/visual--Carmike was the first of the big chains to go all digital (not just your main auditoriums, all of them)--that in itself is a pretty impressive feat when you think about the amount of screens that are now digital. when they replaced the projectors, they took care of the sound as well. That shouldn't be a problem with popping in and out any longer.
Now for my soap box...I truly laughed about the gummies on the screen, I remember that crap when I was there and we couldn't knock the damn things down since they were in the upper left corner, but we tried. Unless I was going to go get the 30 foot ladder with the 20 foot vertical extension, that was the only way they were coming down and I'm afraid I don't get paid enough to fall 50 feet. &@#% THAT. The god damn ladder was scary just seeing it set up.
When it comes down to it, I am as bad or worse when it comes to watching my movie. I want crap perfect, I would check the sound 50 times, the frame 50 times, and check the sound again. When I go to other theatres, the first thing I look for is to see if it is in frame. You could say that the shine for everything but the movie has worn off on me because I went to the same place for five years, frankly I didn't give a crap what it looked like (including the huge pop stains from hell in the lobby all the time). However, I could see as an outsider, if you walk in, you want the place to look nice, you'd like to see the neon, the lobby to look clean, etc. I can buy into that, however on the same hand, you and I both understand that people go to a movie literally once or maybe twice a year on average, if that. This is why seats is important, especially for chains. If we don't have room to put their asses in our seat, we have lost revenue and likely, they won't come back to see the movie (if they even go see it at all).
This all leads into a catch 22 though. How do you make your staff and lobby look good without spending a crap ton of movie on it. At what standard must you hold for normal people to say '&@#% this place, it looks like crap.' and lastly, what is your sweet spot so you can hit max people vs satisfaction and still have them come back for another movie.
I can tell you another thing...carmike always treated us like the red-headed step child of the chain. We made more money than pretty much the whole district combined and we still couldn't get a tech on site to fix our crappy stuff. Unfortunately, when the tech showed up, he didn't know how to run this old crap and fix it either. We would literally run with half broken platters all the time, sometimes having to manually move the damn film from one platter to another for a show because we couldn't get it to payout correctly and it would usually wrap.
I could go on and on for crap that could of been better. There is no end to that so I'm not arguing that point. I really do think though, if seth childs was local, it would be night and day. From what I am told though, the new equipment works really well and they have had very little issue with it. Being the old school theatre guy, I'm there for the movie and sound, that's it. I don't buy anything, just want to watch my movie, which for all purposes now a days, I do at home and have been to a movie theatre 2 times in the last 4 years since I quit.
I do miss it though, working upstairs was a tough job, but we got away with a lot of bullcrap too. I think I watched an average of 3 movies a week while I worked there...had/met a lot of friends there.
I am also curious though, how much do they pay starting out and what do the movies run? We had a few people every year from the warren's come in and apply, they all walked away from an offer of 5.15
