Film critic Richard Zoglin takes to the Washington Post today to echo one of my pet peeves. It happened on an outing to see Napoleon:
I counted a dozen commercials, for everything from Hyundai to M&M’s, before the Regal voice of God told us to silence our cellphones and “enjoy the show” — after which came another slew of ads, for various Pepsi drinks; six trailers for upcoming movies (because where better than a screening of “Napoleon” to look for fans of “Drive-Away Dolls” and “Aquaman and the Lost Kingdom”?); and a pitch for the Regal Unlimited subscription plan. Thirty minutes in hard-sell captivity before the movie finally started.
This whole thing has gotten completely out of hand. I can't say it's the biggest reason I see so few movies these days, but it's definitely one of them.
And as long as I'm complaining about corporate suckitude, let's talk about airlines. Marian and I are going to Europe this spring and last night I bought the tickets. After laying out several thousand dollars, I clicked to choose our seats and almost fell off my chair. Finnair charged me $500 to reserve our seats to Helsinki and then on to Prague. Not special seats. This was merely the standard fee to reserve any seat at all. Then it was another $100 to British Airways for the leg home from Vienna to London.¹
The last time we went to Europe was only two years ago and it didn't involve any of this crap. Is this because things have changed in a mere two years? Or because some airlines charge and others don't? Whatever the case, it amounted to a 10% surcharge just to get a seat assignment. wtf?
¹But American Airlines didn't charge anything for the final leg home from London to LA. Is this because they have a different policy? Because I booked the tickets through American? Because I'm a lifetime Advantage Gold member from my old road warrior days? I don't know.
Same with subscription services, pay for access, and still have to watch ads, NBA League Pass is the only exception I've found, where most, but not all, commercials are replaced with a "Game Break" graphic, and they reduced the price this year by 50%, so not as mad at the NBA.
At some point, when more important things have been dealt with, this is something Congress might want to look into.
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I thought the column about the movies was ridiculous. When I go to any movie theatre in my city almost no one watches the ads before the lights go down at the scheduled time for the movie. Everyone either talks, looks at their phone or goes back out to buy snacks after saving their seats. When I went to see the Barbie movie my friend and I had a delightful conversation with the women sitting in front of us. We are all baby boomers so we remember when Barbies first came out. (Also wig hats!)
The author of that whiny article must not be a boomer because back in the day we might not have had ads before the feature started but we did have cartoons and newsreels as well as trailers. If he really hates the ads he should just go to a theater that has reserved seating and not show up until the scheduled time for the movie to start — or a little later.
I don’t think I have ever seen ads come on after the start time when the lights go down, just trailers. My only complaint about trailers is that they should be better matched to the movie, especially if it’s a kids’ movie. Sometimes the trailers are really inappropriate for my younger grandkids. I want to see movie theaters survive so if showing ads helps them weather these tough financial times I’m more than fine with that.
On the other hand I completely agree about the airlines. If the US is going to allow consolidation to reduce competition then the FAA needs to impose more regulations. For years Republicans have been touting the benefits of free market capitalism sayjnig that competition gives us not only better prices but higher quality. Then they refuse to do anything when corporations do everything they can to reduce or eliminate competition — and most of the media refuses to point out their deep dishonesty.
When service gets this bad, you know you're dealing with monopolies.
only sort of true. by most accounts, Ma Bell had quite good service. their monopoly meant they were so awash in money that they could easily afford to hire the tons of people needed to serve their customers while still having plenty left over. there was a similar dynamic with the airlines pre-regulation - regulated airfare being incredibly expensive relative to today allowed them to be lavish with their treatment of customers.
shitty service seems to be as much a product of:
-thinning margins inducing firms to cut service to the bone;
-modern rapacious management by MBA pricks who know that the government doesn't have enough power to keep them in check.
-customers simply not having the power, resolve, or organizing capability to demand better. the movie theater business is oligopolistic for sure, but at the end of the day most customers would rather pay $15 to AMC to get bombarded with ads than pay $22 to the Alamo Drafthouse to avoid all that.
re my second point - i think that Ma Bell being under constant threat for decades, antitrust-wise, kept its worst instincts in check. they knew what they could and couldn't get away with - not being in any hurry to introduce consumer cellular service wouldn't raise the ire of the government, but they couldn't just fire 80% of their customer-facing employees and piss off the entire country without getting bodyslammed into oblivion.
whereas today every company knows that the government is completely toothless when it comes to going after monopolies and oligopolies. they might block your outrageous merger with your only serious competitor, but the antitrust regime has been so gamed that anything short of that is probably going to slide.
I would really like to see some sort of class-action thing against movie theaters for false advertising. Delays between the declared time a movie starts and when it actually starts have gotten so egregious I think at this point they would actually count as false advertising.
As for seat assignments, this is something I know something about it.
It basically comes down to three things; ongoing ticketing price wars exacerbated by the presence of aggregator websites, what the specific airline is, and what policies they have. Many airlines, for example, sell basic economy tickets where you don't get to pick seats period; you get what they assign you in exchange for the lower fare type. If you want to pick seats or check bags or whatnot, you have to pay. Fare types and what is included vary, sometimes significantly, between airlines.
By law, airlines can and must disclose precisely what you're paying for when you buy a ticket. You should always be told if what you're buying includes seat choice or not.
What drives this is basically cold hard numbers. The research on this is solid; while people SAY they want all manner of things to be included in a standard airline ticket and they're willing to pay a little more for it, they're lying. Just straight-up lying. Because the actual consumer behavior is "go to an aggregator website and pick the cheapest listed option."
Now, people are willing to pay a la carte AFTER buying a ticket. The research on that is also fairly solid. In fact, people will actually buy a cheaper fare and then upgrade it a la carte to a price in excess of a fare that included all those upgrades baseline, even if they know in advance that the cheaper fare doesn't include all those things and they'll need to pay to upgrade them. Folks will buy a 250 airfare and then pay 15 dollars for more legroom and 45 dollars to check a bag in preference to buying a 300 dollar airfare that includes both of those things in its price.
It's crazy but that's how it is.
In my case, they were business class seats, so already pretty expensive. Definitely not super cheap coach that doesn't include seat assignment.
I'm curious whether I was told that seat assignments weren't included. Maybe I'll go back and book another seat and see what it says. I don't remember being told the ticket price didn't include a seat, but obviously I might have missed it.
(I *was* told that I had to go to each individual airline to get a seat assignment. Does that count?)
Business class not letting you pick is exceedingly weird. Business class is still the holy grail of airline profits, where they make their nut, and so the base ticket price there still usually includes a lot of amenities.
Keep in mind that when I say "you are required by law to be told" what I mean is "the terms and conditions of what precisely you're buying have to be relatively accessible and relatively clear." In the US, this means they can't just bury everything in the dense legalese of the Contract of Carriage (the actual binding legal agreement you're signing when you "buy a ticket") but somewhere more accessible. But that can still require a lot of clicking and drilling down to find before you buy!
However, I will admit that something I don't know is if that information has to be conveyed via aggregator websites. If I go to Delta Airlines right now, for example (to pick a company at random) I can find relatively complete breakdowns on "what precisely this ticket gets you and what it does not" pretty easily before I buy one.
But I just popped open Kayak to do shopping for the same airfare and if that information is being conveyed there before you buy, I can't find a lot of it.
(Never buy from an aggregator. Always buy from the airline. Aggregators basically cannot get you an actual deal these days.)
It is normal to have to go to each individual airline for your seat assignments on a trip that spans multiple airlines.
If you booked this trip via an aggregator, it is possible there's some weirdness going on between what you THOUGHT you were buying and what you actually bought. Aggregators can be like that.
The NY Times just had an article on aggregators and why one should avoid them: https://www.nytimes.com/2023/12/21/travel/travel-mistakes-tips.html
Use an aggregator to find the flight you want, but then book directly with the airline or hotel. You'll get the same or better deal and you'll only be dealing with one party. The airlines are bad enough. Dealing with a middleman is like asking to be seated between two crying babies.
Business class has been moving in that direction for awhile. British Airways has charged for seat assignments in business class for several years, Finnair and SAS do it now, and Lufthansa is thinking about it.
Remember, a lot of business class is paid for by employers/third parties and thus those folks are eminently gouge-able. Plus, other travelers just want to sleep and do not care about which seat they get in business, so you have a perfect opportunity for price discrimination.
$500 seems like a really excessive price for a seat assignment. Take a zero off and it's still high but not excessive.
Just flew Garuda airlines in Indonesia. We purchased an upgrade to business class in an on line auction before the flight. The two seats were 11 million rupiah (about $700) cheaper than if we had just booked business class from the gitgo. At least in Asia airlines are selling available business class seats in online auctions rather than giving them away as upgrades.
I've flown cross-country twice this month. Once on the company dime, once on mine.
I so vastly prefer dealing with corporate travel. No bullshit, aside from the endless upsells trying to check in. My company also pays significantly less than I did.
I couldn't care less about getting a pre-reserved seat. As far as I'm concerned, stick me wherever. I know they're going to shove me in the worst crap because I refuse to play with their bullshit fake currency, loyalty schemes piss me off and I will not waste my time on that nonsense, and refuse the upsells, because I just don't care. So they try to nickel and dime on every last thing, I learn to hate them just a little bit more, and I do my best to never deal with personal air travel while hoping their executives step on something rusty.
But remember, everyone - USA number one in all things consumer. Which I guess is why so many rich people sing the praises of Singapore Airlines and Emirate Airlines, right?
It's because if you don't reserve a seat they have to strap you to the wing and that causes drag and you'll slow the plane down and then it'll be late and everyone getting off the plane will stare at you because they hate you and it's all your fault and who needs that all that noisy silent glare, and on top of that they don't unstrap you until everyone else is off the plane and maybe they'll forget, you can't know whether they will or not, you're stuck just hanging there.
Yesterday I got an email from Amazon Prime commending themselves on how they're not raising prices but adding commercials unless I cough up another $3 a month.
I just got that email! Outrageous. So I have to decide here whether to dump Amazon or pay the fee. I’m leaning toward dump.
I'm leaning toward dump as well. I think it will be around a year before any of the shows I watch on Prime have a new season and I simply don't have the ambition anymore to get into anything new.
They already have FreeVee [sp?]. This new "pay more or ad" shit had me literally LOLing. What scumbags.
Google is doing the same thing with YouTube, cracking down on ad blockers and forcing users to turn off their ad blockers to watch ads (which are more in quantity and more disruptive - at least movie theaters haven't started running commercials in the middle of the movie yet, have they?) or else pay for YouTube Premium, the price of which they jacked up to around $14 US, to avoid the ads.
I think YouTube is perfectly justified in cracking down on the use of ad-blockers for their free service. I mean, ads are how they make their money so that they can pay to give you free service right?
I mean, are you really outraged that they are not letting you watch their service without paying in any way for it, either by subscription or watching ads?
Amazon already adds “rent” fees to most movies. I can’t see paying the yearly fee, the rental fee and now a no-commercials fee. Screw Bezos and his yacht.
“Screw Bezos and his yacht.”
Sink.
I basically see Prime as free shipping and the video stuff as a freebie add-on
But if I didn't, I'd dump before I paid extra for no ads.
The more corporations or the rich make, the more they squeeze for even more. Real greed is upon us.
"The rich are not like you and me." I forget who first wrote that, but it's proven every day. It seems as if a big difference is that regular people can be satisfied, can have enough. The rich? Never.
Isn’t that from Gatsby? Maybe not. Just a guess…
Just looked it up. F. Scott did say it, but to Hemingway.
I heard that as a conversation between F. Scott Fitzgerald and Hemingway.
Fitz: The rich are different than you and me.
Ernie: Yeah, they've got more money.
I don't know if that's confirmed, but it's funny.
Also, "the rich are different than you and me" is a very solid take on an important theme of The Great Gatsby.
No, they can really make good on their paranoid psychosis.
It would be really incredibly better for all human life if there were a maximum allowable personal wealth limit.
The 90+% marginal tax rates of the 1940s through 1970s sort of did that, but the economy grew too quickly and living standards rose, so they cut taxes.
Exactly
The problem seems to be when buying a flight through a major airline's web site when certain legs of that trip are actually serviced by another airline, via partnership or code sharing arrangements. We purchased tickets through United, and in September flew on United from JFK to Venice. The airfare included the return flight from Dubrovnik Croatia to Vienna, and Vienna back to JFK. And while we chose the fare structure on United Airline's web site that we believed included reserved seats and checked bags door to door, the return flights were operated by Austrian Airlines, and we were subsequently informed that we would have to pay extra to get reserve seating, about $100 all in. Just for fun, we had to pay and additional $80 to check our bags at Dubrovnik, and our reserved seats were not honored nor refunded by Austrian Airlines.
Air travel does truly suck big time.
Some airlines have turned their own websites into mini-aggregators, which is its own kind of hell.
You could simply go to the movies 25-30 min late. That’s what I do at AMC, which has the same problem. Never miss the start of the movie - usually arrive just as Nicole Kidman is extolling the virtues of seeing movies in person… to people already committed to seeing movies in person. (Very weird to get a commercial congratulating you for something you’ve already bought.)
The problem is that sometimes they start the movie fairly punctually. I'm convinced they do this to force people to show up on time, but who knows? It could just be random.
That's the whole idea behind internet advertising. Find out what someone bought and try to sell them another. Surely, you've bought a once in a lifetime purchase online and been bombarded by email and web ad offers for that same once in a lifetime purchase for the next few weeks.
Kevin or somebody needs to plot up the (inflation adjusted) average base airline fares over time. I doubt if those prices, or maybe even the price after seat selection, bags, etc. has gone up.
In the era of regulation airlines competed on services. Now they are supposed to compete on price, but since there is no regulation on what must be offered for a given fare type, they actually compete on fake prices and/or maximize profit by cramming as many people as possible into the plane with as few services as possible.
The airlines' greed has not increased. For things as complicated as air fares, laissez-faire competition does not always lead to the best result. There are too many ways that the consumer can be misled.
Kevin: if you literally bought the ticket from AA (not a third party site and not from a partner airline’s site) AND the flights are AA codeshare, you should be able to call and select seats for free with your Gold status. You may have to call AA first and get the record locator for the partner (this is usually obscured) and then call the partner and firmly insist that OneWorld Ruby status allows for seat selection on AA marketed and ticketed codeshare flights, no matter who flies the actual plane or what fare class bucket they were in.
Hmmm. I wondered about that but didn't have the energy to actually call. And obviously the website simply gave me no choice, so I ponied up.
I'll do almost anything to not call. I emailed my cloud backup service and they emailed back and said to call. I will be canceling tomorrow.
I guess it is a combination of suckitude and the rules we have. It used to be that airlines and the phone company were regulated. The prices were higher but service was standard. Now you get the situation where lots of people refuse to pay for anything but the lowest price. Then they complain about the results. I think this ideology explains a lot.
Nothing new. Isn’t that the old joke? The food at that restaurant is terrible. Yes, and the portions are so small.
People want to pay Harbor Freight prices but expect Snap-On quality.
I find that if I avoid the discount crap life is generally better. I’m a lifelong United Premier member (~2.5 million miles) and United takes good care of me.
From the airlines point of view maybe this makes sense. To compete you need to offer the lowest possible fare, to make a profit you need to claw back some money on baggage fees or selling reserve seats or aisle seats.
Maybe the theaters are looking at a similar equation? They have to compete with home streaming so they can’t raise prices more than they have. They make a little more by showing ads to the audience. Do theaters now sell reserve seats? If not, that’s a missed opportunity. This also explains why snacks and beer and wine are so pricey at the theater.
Movie theaters don't make much money from ticket sales. A huge chunk of it goes to the distributors and studios. They make their money from concession sales and advertising.
Welcome to the modern economy, where everything costs extra. Just like those delivery fees.
I had a very similar experience a month ago when I went to see The Holdovers (great movie!). Exactly as the article describes, we in the audience were bombarded with ads and previews for approximately 30-35 minutes before the movie started. And when you're seeing a more-than-two-hour-long movie, and taking the time to get there and back, and maybe throwing a restaurant or cafe into the mix, an extra half hour here or there really starts to take a few dents out of your day.
So then I went to see Ferrari over this recent Christmas weekend (excellent movie!), and I made a point of showing up late. I was still eating in a nearby restaurant at the advertised start time of the film. I finally sauntered in maybe 15 minutes after the movie was supposed to begin and I found it ... already well underway.
And that's really frustrating. One theater starts a film 30+ minutes late and another starts it close to on time, and you have no way of knowing when it's going to be one or the other. That's a deeply frustrating state of affairs ...
It's because they don't want to advertise what the service really costs.
I bought tickets Portland to Paris and return last July to travel in October. I booked American Airlines flights, paid for them, then was referred to British Airways to buy seats. It wasn’t even an AA flight!
Three of the four British Airways flights were very late, causing missed connections. Truth is, airlines treat their passengers like crap. What to do about it?
I was lucky to live in London once. The movie theaters there published 3 times: when you could get into the theater, when the commercials started and when when the movie started. I usually saw the commercials. They weren’t just ads pulled from the TV and were funny (google Tennants Pilsner may 1989 organ grinder)
Plus at the time Virgin Air offered a deal where if you bought a one way ticket 3 days before departure it was only $200 — for everything.
Did they charge more if you wanted to arrive late and skip the ads?
When I was a kid, you just went to the movies. My family almost always arrived in the middle of one of the double features. We'd stay through the start of the first movie until we started recognizing what we had already watched. Apparently, this was standard into the 1960s when Alfred Hitchcock got the theaters to enforce a fixed arrival time.
Just read that Warner Brothers and Paramount are in talks to merge.
Somehow I don't think this is going to reduce my streaming bill.
Here in Brussels, we now need to choose a seat when booking online (and we are forced to pay an irritating surcharge for the privilege). I like it. Then again, people do seem to come steaming in just as the lights go down.
Some people advise us to keep a gratitude journal. So, finally, I decided to try an ingratitude journal at the start of this past year. I set the bar high, limiting myself to events that truly got under my skin. Looking back, I see that most of my bad days involved online horrors, traveling, and often the two together. BPost, the Belgian postal service comes in third and typically involves an online purchase. The lessons seem clean enough, but I’m not yet ready to change.
In Shakespeare's day it was horses, as in "more diseases than four and twenty horses".
Yes. it has gotten very much worse very quickly. Just part of the pandemic recovery. Which is why the Biden people want to do something about it.
If you want to talk corporate suckitude and air travel, two words: "Duty Free". Duty Free malls have completely taken over airports, and it makes the whole process of traveling overseas so much worse. London Heathrow is a good example of this, as is London Stansted - endless seeming miles of shops before you can get to gate or even find a bathroom. Stansted even charges you £8 to skip the duty free area and go find your gate!
I was just in Bangkok BKK Suvarnabhumi airport, and there must be a kilometer of high end, duty free shops. Not exaggerating. Meanwhile there's no bathroom, no shop seems to sell water, no bench to rest your feet. Shop, dweebs! There's no way to skip this corporate horror and just find your gate.
The concierge service available in Bangkok let's one avoid most of that and makes the whole arrival process much quicker and easier. You get greeted by an expediter and escorted from the jetway to your ride. It was surprisingly inexpensive, maybe $100 for the two of us, so not much more than seat selection. We arranged it with our hotel via email.
The problem isn't arrival. That's not bad at all! Take some conveyor belts, do passport check, get bag, walk to curb. Great!
The problem is departure: you *must* trudge through a kilometer of Duty Free to get to a gate. Or a bathroom. Or a bench. Or a shop that sells water. It's awful.
My pet peeve in this regard is exceedingly petty: it drives me crazy when I pay for a "plus" or subscription service to get a podcast ad free and then there is an add for said service during the podcast. At first I thought the producer or editor must have missed editing it out but no, for some podcasts it is an ongoing "feature", if one that seemingly makes zero sense (hello, I've already paid to not have ads!). Again, incredibly petty I realize but still a peeve.
I've been seeing a lot of movies lately as it's a suitable activity for someone trying to get their depression under control that requires leaving your apartment but doesn't really involve any human contact. It's distracting, it feels like "a night out", you have something to think about rather than just brooding aimlessly. But I'd mostly been going to rep and revival theaters.
I hit a mall multiplex theater for the first time in years the other night and was genuinely shocked at the number of ads. 30 minutes of concentrated ads, one of which was shown twice (important to raise awareness of Pepsi I suppose), totally inappropriate trailers for the film being shown, just wild. I think it's a shame because the actual viewing experience is obviously better, but I can see why people are staying home. Even without near-simultaneous streaming releases I'd be pretty unlikely to hit a multiplex again any time soon. I'll just wait for things to hit the smaller second-run cinemas. What am I going to miss out on, the discourse?