In keeping with my habit of taking time to appreciate the importance of the small stuff in life, I want to talk about one little thing that’s changed in my lifetime that, for me at least, has been a big improvement – the experience of going to the movie theater. More specifically, how the issue of seating is handled at the theater.
When I was in high school, when you wanted to see a movie, you first had to go to the theater to buy the tickets. Online purchases were not an option at that point. Also, and more importantly from my perspective, seating was handled on a first-come-first-served basis. Now, some people don’t care very much about where they are seated in a theater. Others care a lot – if the only seat left is in the front row on the far left side, it can really hamper their ability to enjoy the movie. I’m one of the ones who cares a lot. So in order to make sure I got a good seat, I needed to be among the first to walk in the theater. With very popular movies, this often led to people arriving hours (sometimes days!) before a movie was released to wait in line.
While economists usually love the effects of competition, there are exceptions. Competition in a zero-sum situation is wasteful. Waiting in line is a zero-sum game, where one party can only gain at the expense of another. This in turn can lead to more and more resources being spent to ultimately producing the same outcome – the resource in question here being time and the opportunity cost of what else could have been done with that time. Maybe at first showing up an hour before the movie start time would be enough to be assured you’d get one of the good seats. But once other people catch on to that and start showing up an hour early as well, suddenly you might need to show up an hour and a half earlier – then two hours earlier, and so on, and in extreme cases you can have people literally camping out days ahead of time waiting for a movie. These are huge increases in time and opportunity cost, all leading to the same result.
But modern technology has made this unnecessary. Now you can buy movie tickets online, days or even weeks ahead of time. And most importantly (for me anyway), movie theaters now have assigned seating, so when you buy your tickets you can also select your seat. Now, seats are still assigned on a first-come-first-served basis with this system. The people who buy their tickets earliest get the first choice of seating. But now the time-related transactions costs have been massively reduced. People don’t need to spend hours of their time sitting in a line to “buy” a better seat.
This new system also makes it easier to have more information when making a choice. I might see a movie I want to watch and get ready to buy a ticket, only to then see that it’s already a pretty full showing and there are no good seats left. Knowing this in advance lets me know I might want to look for another showtime on another day, where better seating might be available. And once I’ve selected a ticket, I already know that my spot is locked in, so I don’t feel any need to arrive extra early to the theater to make sure I can find a good seat. And if I’m going to the movies with a group of people, we don’t need to all show up early to make sure there are enough free seats in a row for everyone to sit together.
But of course, not everyone cares that much about where they end up sitting. But this technological improvement is still good even accounting for this, because it can ensure a higher level of consumer surplus. Suppose there’s a movie in theaters we both might want to see. Tickets are $15. I value seeing the movie with a good spot at $25, but if I had a lousy seat, I might only value it at $12. You value it at $20 regardless of where you sit. With pre-assigned seating, if only bad seating (from my perspective) is available, I will pass on that showing because it would be a three dollar loss for me to take it, but for you it’s still a five dollar gain. This will tend to cause the final tickets for any showing to go to the customers who value them those tickets more – leading to a higher total consumer surplus at a much lower cost in time.
I freely admit that this is far from a life changing shift in my quality of life – it’s just a nice improvement. And maybe to you, it’s not even worth thinking about. But these small, incremental improvements in the quality of life really build up over time – and taking a moment to notice them and be grateful for them is definitely a worthwhile exercise.
