Cinemark is embarrassing and an example of why theaters should and need to die.
They pay absolutely horrible, yet expect their employees to sacrifice their holidays and weekends and provide “exceptional customer service”.
They cap manager pay in the low $20s for SENIOR managers. There is no upward mobility. You make it to assistant manager or senior assistant manager, and then they cap your pay, and you’re done. Very rarely to general manager positions become available.
They truly believe that providing free movie tickets and 50% off concessions is a way to make up for paying $11-15 an hour, and it just goes to show how delusional and out of touch they are.
Theaters are frequently and PURPOSEFULLY understaffed to increase profits and keep shareholders happy, and all this is doing is contributing to an increasingly awful moviegoing experience. There aren’t enough ushers to properly clean the theaters during busy times, let alone do routine theater checks to find disruptive guests.
At prime locations that regularly do 3,000-4,000 guests each weekend day, they think it’s okay to skirt by with 4-5 concession stand workers for the matinee and evening shifts. This means each employee could be encountering 600-700 customers per hour, which is completely unacceptable and leads to lines out the door and angry customers.
On top of understaffing the concession stand, they also expect their underpaid employees to run an online deliver-to-seat service with absolutely no extra incentives/increase in pay. Multiple times throughout their shift are these underpaid employees expected to go into multiple theaters in the dark and carry bags full of food and drink to customers, all for no extra pay, and also no option to accept tips from customers.
Managers are regularly sent email updates about how well the company is doing, how profits continue to be “record breaking”, etc. and yet no one at the theater level is seeing any of this. The people bringing the company all of this money and working on the frontlines are not compensated at all for their hard work, beyond maybe allocating $100 to a theater every so often for a pizza party.
Cinemark is as greedy and stingy as they come. One could only pray that their horrible and manipulative business tactics come back to haunt them.
