I'm going to do a rare thing and target the local Regal theatres on this, because I suspect from other comments that it is a nationwide problem caused by a policy at the corporate level or circuitwide contract for carpet cleaning. To be fair, Regal is absolutely not the only theatre circuit with this problem.

I'll relate two stories about carpet cleaning, since they are instructive.

When I was new to managing, it was standard policy to shampoo carpets with a rotary shampooer. Touch ups were done with a hand shampooer. Over the course of a couple of years of doing this the carpet at my theatre began to stink. My DM instructed me to find a new carpet cleaner that was able to do "steam" extraction, and expect to pay a bare minimum of eight cents a square foot for proper cleaning. This was in 1974, so with inflation that would be over twenty-five cents a square foot in today's money.

The cleaner that won the bid had the HIGHEST price, fifteen cents a square foot. He won because of his comments and observations, and those have stuck with me to this day. After loosing a corner from the tack strips and examining the carpet and padding, his first comment was that the theatre had a top grade thick wool carpet with a jute backing, properly installed over padding, and that the carpet could easily last for forty or more years if properly maintained.

His second comment was a suggestion to rent rubber backed entry carpets to absorb all the water, mud, and salt from people walking in from the snow covered sidewalks, and rotate them as they became soaked and dirty. Unknown to me, there was a local service that provided these entry carpets inexpensively and exchanged them on a weekly basis.

His third comment started with the question "Do you leave shampoo on your hair and let it dry with the shampoo still on it?" The obvious answer effectively made his point that shampooing a carpet merely moved dirt from the surface downwards towards the backing, where the salt and sand could abrade the fibers.

The forth comment was a warning - never soak a jute backed carpet. It will stink and shrink, opening up seams that may not go back together.

The process that he used to clean the carpet was to overspray the spots with a garden sprayer, use a rotary shampooer on a section, then immediatly go over that same section with a "steam" hot water spray and extractor, then repeat using just the vaccuum part of the extractor.

The difference after the first cleaning was as apparent as the difference between night and day. The carpet fairly glowed, and smelled fresh. To this day, I am convinced that this is the best way to clean a dirty carpet. I've seen other methods, I've heard the schpeils about not getting a carpet wet, I've seen incompetent "steam" cleaners, and I've seen the shitty results of many fly-by-night outfits.

That brings me to the second story. I had moved to Miami and just taken over managing the 167th Street Theatre, an old Loew's house run by Wometco. The janitor, Armando, had worked at the theatre for about twenty years, and part of his responsibilities were keeping the carpet clean. Armando had only been supplied a rotary shampooer.

Armando and I did our first tour of the theatre to get acquainted. I noticed a stiffness to the lobby carpet and a dull white overcoat to the fibers, but didn't say anything. I then went into the auditoriums and happened to comment "This is smart, the aisle carpets in here are black." Armando replied, "No, I think they are dark red. They used to be lighter, but the carpet darkened with age."

I thumped my fingernail on the carpet and it was totally firm like linoleum, yet it had a sticky feel...

"Armando, you'll still get the same pay and I'm not upset, but I'm going to have a pro come in and clean the carpets from now on." The assistant mentioned that there had been a young man who had repeatedly come by, wanting to clean the carpets. He was called in, and he proudly showed his "dry carpet cleaning pads," claiming that they would quickly absorb all the dirt from our carpets without damaging them.

Being obnoxiously brash and positive, he agreed to a bet. We would do a test with me watching. He would clean a four by three foot area of aisle carpet with his pads. After that he would go over the same area with a portable extractor rented from a supermarket. If the water sucked up by the extractor was dirty, he would do the entire carpet with an extractor until the water came clean. In either case, if I was satisfied with his work, I'd recommend him for the carpet cleaning of all the Wometco theatres.

After dirtying about a half-dozen pads cleaning a small area of the aisle carpet, he pronounced it clean and started the extractor. The extracted water looked like Guinness Stout, black and foamy from the years of shampoo build-up. I smiled, and he readily agreed that he'd been sold a bill of goods on his cleaning pads.

He rented two extractors, and at the end of the last show of the night I let him start on the job. Nine hours later, when I returned, he was still there and had only worked his way through an aisle and a half in the large auditorium. His clothes were filthy and he looked like he was in shell shock.

Armando was there as well, doing his regular duties, but was in a panic. "I didn't know that this shampoo was so bad! All the other managers just kept telling me to shampoo more!" I had to assure him again that he wasn't in danger of losing his job, but that I expected things to be clean and would inspect with him regularly.

The carpet cleaner finished after the second full night of work. He was awarded the cleaning rights to the theatres, and he also got to clean the seats as well. The color of the aisle carpets? The large auditorium had standard red carpet. The smaller auditorium had blue-green.

These were extreme examples of what happens even in big circuits with good reputations, like the old Loews and Wometco. Corporate executives simply don't budget properly for purchase, maintenance, and replacement of carpets, which IMO has to be one of the most singularly stupid cost savings measures possible.

The trend in new construction has been to specify inexpensive glue-down synthetic carpet with poly backing. These carpets SHOULD be a simple matter to clean using extraction, since they shouldn't shrink and split seams. However, cost cutting is such that even these carpets are rarely cleaned, and when they are, the cleaning is done by a two cents per square foot low bidder with NO supervision.

I'll say it publicly. I estimate that 95% off all theatres have at least one area or auditorium that STINKS like from carpet dirt and mold. This is both because corporate demands the use of incompetant carpet cleaners, and because managers aren't willing to stay up all night, stand over carpet cleaners and say "NO, you can't do a single wand pass over that carpet and call it clean. You WILL prespray and do the job right, with a minimum of two passes over every inch of carpet."

Even when the brash young carpet cleaner got his wish to clean Wometco and expanded operations, I would check the work of his employees. If it wasn't done right, they came back and did it again until it was right. Both he and I wanted a quality job.

If you have control over this aspect of maintanence, you need to be as strict. People will not willingly patronize theatres that smell worse than their cat's litter box. I've lately found myself avoiding certain theatres for this reason alone.

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After a year, we even had the steam-cleaners in to steam-clean the sound-fold on the walls. It was a very visible difference and the rooms smelled better than they did before cleaning. They just vacuumed the walls and spot cleaned trouble areas.

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