Perhaps it is a sign of getting old, but I seem to be growing increasingly intolerant of the way we as consumers are treated.
We took my two kids and one of his friends to Thorpe Park recently for my son’s birthday, the tickets (even with discounts) are not inexpensive and with the concessions during the day, petrol etc., we must of spent over £200. It isn’t something that we do often and he didn’t really have any other present so it’s a little excessive but OK.
We haven’t been to Thorpe park for years and it has changed a lot since we last went so after looking around for a map and not finding one, we decided to buy one.
For 50p I expected a programme of some kind with at least several pages and a cover. Instead I was handed a single sheet of A5, printed with the map on one side and an advert on the other. What a rip off, this is the sort of thing that we should be given with our tickets not sold.
Today we went to the pictures to see SpiderMan 3. Again, the tickets were quite expensive, the popcorn doubly so (£6 for 4 medium popcorns), we had to queue to get in to the cinema and there was the melee to get a seat because the American owned cinema that bullied in to our local shopping centre has abolished ticketed seating so it is first come first served.
When we took our seats we waited 25 minutes sitting through a projected slideshow of still adverts, then another 40 minutes of moving adverts and 20 minutes of trailers before the film started.
It is pure greed that they subject a captive paying audience to pre-roll advertising, they know that cancelling the ticketed seating makes people take and keep their seats and watch the ads. It is manipulative and conniving. If there was one reason to pirate movies and watch at home it is pre-roll advertising.
And they wonder why cinema attendance is down.