Less royalty, more serfdom. - Floor Staff Regal Employee Review

I have a day off, so this shall be an attempt to summarize the litany of reasons why Regal, contrary to their recruitment spots, is not an ideal place to “get your start in the movie business”, and why the company I joined several years ago is rapidly fading into history. What I’ve gathered from years of working at and frequenting Regal is that they prioritize cost leadership over service differentiation or employee satisfaction. This infuses almost every policy they maintain, from their higher-than-average ticket prices to their grueling scheduling. On weekday nights, my 20-screen location would customarily assign one person to close both the kitchen and the concessions stand, usually keeping that person and the manager on site until 1:30 AM at the earliest, sometimes until 3 AM depending on the mess and ability to pre-close. It didn’t matter if the closing worker went overtime and claimed time-and-a-half, as someone probably did the math and found that paying two people to close would cost even more. My cineplex recently enlisted a separate team of janitors to clean out the stand, sending the regular staff home two to three hours earlier, but I doubt this arrangement holds for all locations. Other odd and possibly counterproductive cost-minimizing measures include: * Selling beer or wine or decaffeinated coffee that no one wants in order to secure a better deal from suppliers * Asking 70-year-olds for photo ID to buy a 4-5 oz. pour of wine so meager it couldn’t get a high-schooler buzzed. * Scheduling people to work certain shifts and then cancelling them, bizarrely for legal purposes, so as to prevent accidently amassing more than 50 full-time employees (basically impossible) and having to offer insurance. * Deliberately understaffing during busy periods to the effect that if one person calls out—and someone often does—everybody else gets anchored to a register for two hours, unable to restock anything. In 2018 a British chain named Cineworld with a noticeably different aesthetic and branding acquired Regal for $3.6B, and since then they’ve wasted little time messily hacking their American counterpart into a soulless and ineffectual yet potentially more profitable mirror of their glitzy, modernized, carnivalesque image. * At the beginning of this year, Regalworld drastically scaled back the employee pass perk with no forewarning, slashing the number of “free” tickets that part-time workers can redeem from two a day, or 14 a week, to two a week, effectively decreasing the value of a compelling benefit by 86%. Now any Regal grunt who takes more than a passing interest in movies has to choose between sharing an experience with friends and actually catching everything they want to see, where no such conflict existed before. As I understand the relationships, theater contracts with distributors allow them to waive a certain percentage of tickets for their employees, and exhibitors who exceed their permitted allowance have to compensate the studios. Ostensibly Regal enacted this cutback to avoid a massive payment to Disney, because some workers were watching Infinity War half a dozen times and the data showed that most employees don’t utilize more than two tickets a week. Rather than simply limiting passes to movies produced by the money-grubbing corporate leviathan that is Disney, Regalworld opted to punish the cinephile employees who had the greatest incentive to stay with them in the age of Moviepass, Sinemia, and other affordable subscription options. Even unskilled workers have plenty of openings at their disposal which pay better or involve less fatiguing and robotic labor. Why would an exhibition company undercut the most enticing advantage to working for them in 2019, when the barrier to keeping up on current films is arguably lower than any time since the 1940s? * Not long after gutting the ticket perk, which has already inspired at least half a dozen people in my vicinity to seek more rewarding employment, Regalworld internally announced that they would be terminating all part-time manager positions and demoting all but three associate managers to “team leaders”, who work full-time but are curiously exempted from the marginally better benefits (4 tickets vs. 2) that FT managers enjoy. Not only does this insult and demoralize the managers who slaved away for Regal for months or even years to move up the ladder, but it will also increase turnover of future employees by stultifying upward mobility and driving talent to other food service chains, e.g. In N Out, that promote more quickly from within. The “rightsizing” of supervisor staff from 8-11 at certain locations down to a maximum of 7 sends the message that Regal don’t want their grunts to have a balanced life or career aspirations outside of the company; either you commit yourself to 40 hours/week for slim pay and let your education fall by the wayside, or you settle for minimum wage work with little autonomy and try to find something more fulfilling in your paltry free time. * Reserved seating. I get that no one in corporate wants to acknowledge mistakes or incur the embarrassment of rolling them back, but switching all large multiplexes over to reserved seating was a colossal and unmitigated failure of judgment that has probably cost Regal thousands of customers. Almost nobody in America wants this, and the overhaul has exacerbated lines both at the box office and at guest services. The policy is especially damaging at theaters frequented mostly by senior citizens, who can’t read the seat numbers and take out their frustration on the employee. * Before Cineworld took over, I used to walk straight to the break room, drop my personal belongings off in the same place I’d later recover, and clock in directly outside. In their noble quest to fix everything that wasn’t broken in the first place, our new European overseers made sure to splinter the locker room off from the break room, which remains at the opposite end of a long hallway. As management explained the development to us, those across the Atlantic don’t like “looking at people’s dirty laundry”, i.e. backpacks and purses, leastwise not in the same area where they consume their meals. Consequently, if workers now want to take their belongings with them on break, they have to account for the 3-5 minutes they’ll have to waste traveling between the locker and the break room. * Upper management and/or corporate doesn’t trust floor staff to do anything intellectually demanding. Accepting a $50 or a $100 bill? You gotta call a manager. Wine bottle or keg ran empty? Gotta call a manager. Need to apply a special discount at concessions or issue a caregiver/employee pass? Gotta call a manager. Customer wants a refund on last transaction after her child changed mind on candy? Gotta call a manager. I want to give corporate the benefit of the doubt, to assume they’re fully aware of their actions’ ramifications and are simply trying to save a couple pennies. That would be economically justifiable. On the other hand, I highly doubt that most of Regalworld’s executives or district managers spend much time at the cinemas, let alone appreciate what people on the ground experience in running them. Favorite movies cited in newsletter spotlights of salaried employees generally run the gamut of “Indiana Jones” and “Star Wars” (no specific entry), "Jurassic Park", "Jaws", and "The Godfather". These choices are not indicative of individuals who closely follow the art form and want to cultivate a special, reverent place for celebrating it.