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Topic: Drive-In Car Counters
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Barry Floyd
Phenomenal Film Handler
Posts: 1079
From: Lebanon, Tennessee, USA
Registered: Mar 2000
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posted 09-30-2010 10:31 AM
Since we charge a "per person" price instead of a carload price, having a truly 100% accurate car count isn't that big a deal for us. However that being said, we do use car count numbers to verify average attendance, use the numbers for "break outs" on concession sales per car, patrons per car, etc.
At our ticket booth, if a vehicle with 2 people show up, they are handed 3 tickets (2 admission tickets and 1 car count ticket). About 30 minutes after the first movies start, we have one of our parking attendants walk the field and physically count the cars with a hand held tally counter ("clicker"). The parking attendant counts each field, and then reports those numbers to either me or my wife. After the box office closes, the box office attendant brings her paperwork to the building, and we can compare ticket numbers vs. tally counts.
99% of the time both numbers match.
We got ours HERE
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Scott D. Neff
Theatre Dork
Posts: 919
From: San Francisco, CA
Registered: Oct 1999
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posted 10-01-2010 01:53 PM
The reason for car counters is to prevent cashiers from accepting your cash but never reporting it by selling a ticket. Because Drive-Ins are so rare these days people don't understand that they're supposed to receive a ticket just like they do at a regular theatre. In fact most people coming to our drive-ins (unless they're regulars) are more concerned with where they're supposed to park and what radio station they're supposed to tune into.
We too charge by the person, currently on a cash register. As far as the register is concerned we ring up by the number of people in the party. So if there are three of you in the car and you want to see a movie on screen #7, we have a button for "Screen #7 - 3 Adults". At the end of the night the difference between the opening and closing transaction total equals how many cars we sold. We will from time to time go out and count the fields but on a Saturday night it's next to impossible to count all the cars, especially without getting disoriented.
One of our managers recently went and did a count on a Saturday and found an extra 40 cars on the lot. Luckily it was at one of our smaller theatres so it didn't take him too long, but he had to do it twice to make sure his eyes didn't play tricks on him. We assume an average of two people per car, @ $6.75 a head, that's $540. When you have four cashiers selling tikets to all screens it's hard to narrow down who's responsible but if they knew we could compare their transaction count to the number of cars that have driven through their box office, this likely wouldn't happen (or at least happen less frequently). While this won't eliminate people from just ringing up two people in the car instead of three, at least if we can be certain of our car counts we can monitor that through Per Car averages.
What I'm finding is that all the modern technology is too finicky or is made for applications where they aren't trying to count down to the very last car. How many parking garages have you driven into with these gizmos that say there are 25 spaces left on the second floor for you to find out there are none? I doubt that the transportation authorities need their sensors to be 100% accurate, they just need to know there's a crapload of cars driving over them or not. Also, with the hoses, they're meant to be driven over in a straightforward manner. When you have these positioned at a box office where the car may need to make a hard right to turn onto a screen, or where our driveway is curved for dramatic 1960's effect, the air is never forced through the hose to trip the counter.
So this leads me back to the original treadles like Eprad and other companies made back in the day. Because we've more or less abandoned these thinking the new technology would work anything I might have had to examine is long since destroyed. If anybody knows (and it sounds like Louis you might) how to create and install these things, please let me know. Also, I keep hearing that these were completely reliable. Having only worked with them briefly on the periphery of my job, I never really noticed if they were. Does anybody have insight into whether these were reliable or if perhaps managers back in the day fudged the numbers to make my bosses think they were?
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