Regal Reviews

Disclaimer: What follows is the self-indulgent testimony of a self-proclaimed disgruntled employee. Maybe it's not actually as bad as it seems, maybe I'm just bitter, wallowing in misery and exaggerating my perceived troubles, so feel free to take everything you're about to read here with a grain of salt. 5 word minimum? I wonder what the maximum is? Dim the lights. Cue that iconic Regal Rollercoaster. Enjoy the feature presentation. This...is going to be a long one. As anyone reading should know, Regal was acquired last year by the UK-based Cineworld Group, solidifying Cineworld's dominance as the second-largest cinema chain in the world and sealing Regal's fate as one more of their hapless dummy corporations. Right away there was talk of corporate layoffs and resignations, which naturally left all the theatre-level staff with questions and concerns, but the first real changes enacted by our leadership were ones we had been requesting for a very long time. Case in point, Old Regal didn't like tattoos. At New Regal, staff with tattoos get to display them now! They don’t have to wear the long-sleeved polos anymore! Can’t wait to see what other bold, progressive new initiatives the new Regal will lead us on! Turns out a lot of the rest of the updates did more to erode morale than boost it. It was a lot of little things, innocuous enough to take in by themselves, but when all put together painted a chilling image of an extremely restrictive and oh so micro-managerial upper management philosophy. For a company that loves to tout itself as The Best Place to Watch a Movie they sure do love to belittle and chastise theatre management for things that have absolutely nothing to do with the guest experience. Box office organization, manager office organization, janitorial organization, stockroom organization, projection booth organization, back kitchen organization, front counter organization. Seems reasonable, if a little demanding, until you realize what “organization” means to them: place everything into plastic bins that look prettier but take more space, hold less stuff, and stack together less efficiently than the plain cardboard boxes they all come shipped in. Such obsession with the “presentation” of places and things that the guests will NEVER SEE is ludicrous to me. "You're storing the old manager shift logs, employee files, building inspections and TCA reports in cardboard? That just won’t do. Now, I see you have swept and mopped each individual step leading up to your booth, you've carefully dusted all your projectiors' lenses and auditorium port windows, but you have failed to meet Regal’s standards because you didn’t dust beneath your projectors. The area of the ceiling surrounding the rooftop access hatch is all discolored, dinged and chipped, paint it." I'm paraphrasing but my Regional Director actually noted these things during his last inspection visit to my theatre, and that’s just what he had to say of the booth. The rest of the building tour went the same: all criticism, none of it constructive. The managers of my building spent a hell of a lot of time working maintenance shifts, coming during non-operational hours in the dead of night to accomplish the inane bidding of our bosses, only for our team to get grilled for not just making the floor staff do it all. I’m sorry but how do color-coded 1.5” binders for filing paperwork make us The Best Place to Watch a Movie? How does painting the roof access hatch on the booth ceiling make us the Best Place to Watch a Movie? These aren't rhetorical questions, I'm sincerely curious. While I concur that no one wants a grimy facility, are you seriously going to demand we dust the tops of the auditorium speakers and paint the hinges of the emergency doors? If you so sincerely want to make Regal be the Best Place to Watch a Movie, how about instead of forcing new headaches into the experience like reserved seating (an "improvement" which no one here asked for, and which our guests universally LOATHE by the way) you fix existing ones such as auditorium #10’s scratchy sound system, or #12’s ceiling lights since the LEDs currently in place are always just a tad too bright even at full-dim when the feature is playing? These have been known issues for almost the whole length of time I’ve worked at my theatre but forget it, because apparently ensuring TOP NOTCH AUDIOVISUAL PRESENTATION QUALITY is less important to Regal than sorting candies in the storeroom into PLASTIC BINS. "The Best Place to Watch a Movie." Am I the only one who sees what’s wrong with this picture? And I haven't even gotten started on the banger of a year that is 2019. I'll start with the Pass Catastrophe. Two passes a day for part-time staff and four a day for fulltime managers had been the policy for years, but as of Jan 2, 2019 it's now 2-or-4 per week. You work part-time and see one movie with one friend? That's your whole week. The company's stated reasoning for the update was to better align the program with historic and current usage trends in an effort to maintain the delicate balance between providing the perk to us, the staff, and honoring our organization’s strategically important studio relationships and obligations” Sorry to sound like the entitled millennial that I am but I've always regarded free movie tickets as the signature perk of working in the film exhibition industry. It's what attracts a lot of hopeful applicants to this job in the first place over, say the McDonald's or Safeways of the world, so yanking the benefit's leash this short, so to speak, seems ill-advisedly stingy. "Historic and current usage"? "Studio relationships and obligations”? This sounds like Regal's PR-approved way of telling us we're a bunch of freeloaders and they're tired of footing the bill to the movie studios for the films we see. As if they can't afford it. Please. They don't provide any real benefits to their part time staff who comprise the vast majority of their company's workforce, and the profit margins on our concessions are exorbitant; I'm sure they can afford to pay the studios for our tickets. All they've accomplished by doing this is they've ticked off all of their current staff and they've made the prospect of working here considerably less enticing for those who don't already. So yeah: ill-advisedly stingy. Daily passes or weekly passes, in the end it doesn't matter. It's a bummer, but I can tolerate a bummer. It's still free movies, just less of them. In mid-January, all of the company's General Managers were to be corralled together for a special “summit”, as they called it, in Nashville, and the revelations to come out of that summit amounted to more than the “bummer” that the tickets were. They were genuinely upsetting, and are now the whole reason why I have decided to organize my feelings, put them to writing, and post to the public in this review. Before the Nashville pow-wow a manager at my theatre joked they were probably just rounding all the GM's into one location so some Cineworld Suit onstage could press a killswitch and drop all their chairs into a tank of full of Dr. Evil's patented Laser Sharks. The reality was more or less a cheaper version of that scenario: they informed the GM's that the company would be paying everyone (including those very same GM's) less money going forward, handed killswitches to all of those GM's, and instructed them to go back home, click the button, and feed us, their associate managers, to the ill-tempered mutated sea bass they could acquire for a fraction of what the sharks cost. That all is to say that the role of the associate manager, my role, is being dismantled entirely—or rather, the title is. The day to day work of that title's not going anywhere, but it won't be “managers” who perform these duties; it'll be Team Leads. Team Leads are full-time employees who perform basically the same role an associate manager does now, except they're not issued a building key, a safe code, office access, theatre email access, and they only get two passes. What, did you expect more? Only full-time managers get four passes a week, and Team Leads aren't “managers”. Fun! Same job, no office, less pay, less passes. There will be one designated Senior Team Lead who does get a building key, but they'll generally be discouraged from using it outside of dire emergencies. Think of it as a reserve manager, if you will. What a joke. Moreover, there will be less Manager and Team Lead positions combined under the new structure than the total number manager positions currently held at my building, so some of us aren't even going to be afforded the ““privilege”” of a demotion to a more cumbersome, lesser-paying, all-around worse version of our current jobs; they'll be relegated to a floor staff position they're tremendously overqualified for where they can never hope to earn anything more than a dollar above the minimum hourly wage, or they'll have to resign. How do the even expect Team Leads to do their jobs when vital tools necessary to fulfill our roles are kept in the office? They're supposed to give readmission tickets to guests with issues and cash exchanges to cashiers as they run low on 1's, 5's, quarters, etc. but we keep our re-ads and cash in the safe--the safe they're not allowed to have an access code to, the safe that we keep inside the office they're not allowed a key to! By design, it looks to me like Team Leads are not allowed to do their own job! As for those few managers who retain the status of “real” managers things are no better; in fact, they're worse than they've ever been. Most buildings, including mine, will only have three. A GM, a Deputy GM (formerly First Assistant), and one Assistant (basically what an Associate is currently, without the limitations of Team Leads). Let’s run some numbers. Assuming every manager works five shifts a week, that's a total of 15 manager shifts per week, 1 manager per shift. 7 of those shifts are opening, the day and 7 of those are closing the day. The 15th shift is sort of a tossup, but what this basically all means is that a whole 2/3rds of our entire managerial roster will be scheduled to work at some point on any given business day, except for the one day a week when all three will be. With no other full-time managers on staff to shuffle around as needed, and no part-time managers to speak of whatsoever who could pick up extra shifts when the full-timers can't swap, theatre managers going forward can say farewell freedom and expect to always be considered On Call. No. More. Flexibility. If any single manager can't make it into work, then it comes down to one of the other two: the one manager who has the day scheduled off is obligated to come in for the shift and failing that the other manager who's already working that day has essentially no choice but to work a double. Theoretically there's also that Senior Team lead I mentioned earlier but let's just consider this one a nonfactor. After all, at Regal we like playing make believe, inventing problems that don't have to exist and roadblocking solutions to ones that actually do. What happens if a manager gets the flu and is too sick to work for multiple days? What if they get snowed in at their house? What if—oh dear God here's the WORST conceivable scenario—a manager wants to use vacation time to actually go on VACATION for a week or longer? I’ll tell you what: those who remain available either both work seven-day weeks, or they trade off working open/close doubles each day. At least Assistant Managers are paid an hourly rate so when they need to work above 40 hours they'll get overtime pay. DGM's and GM's are salaried, which means they can and very well may have to work well above 40 hours per week AND they'll be paid less to do so than they are now. Enthusiasm on the job is so low, managers with decades' experience in the company are seeking a way out, and I can't imagine very many are exactly clambering for the opportunity to replace them. They're already overworked and most of them are about to be more grossly underpaid than ever. Anyone who would take the task head on is either a noble martyr, a naive tool, or a psycho masochist with a deathwish. No matter the case, the end is the same: The job's a suicide mission, and every theatre employee knows it. Regal has rendered the role of the general manager undesirable, unmanageable, and they know it just as well as the rest of us, hence a certain update to they jimmied into the promotion policy a day or two after they told us about the restructuring. The new promotion policy stipulates that Regal can choose to promote or transfer Team Lead and Management personnel to other theatres within “reasonable distance” (more vague policy definitions, thank you Regal). You don't take the promotion? You could get a demotion, potentially a termination even! What if a manager or lead doesn't have a car, because they don't need one because they live close to their theatre and can get to their “usual” workplace fine without one? We're theatre managers, not District Managers, and involuntary travel is not what we signed up for when we took this job. They claim they’re doing what they’re doing to ensure they promote only the most motivated candidates, but to accomplish this end they’ve effectively KILLED any motivation for present staff to continue working for this company, LET ALONE TO MOVE UP WITHIN IT. The only ones who may possibly agree to move up will be those who feel they have no choice, because they're terrified to lose this thankless job and, as is known, denying a promotion offer at Regal is tantamount to resignation. Even then you're damning them if the promotion involves a transfer since if they can't afford to quit there's more than a fair chance they can't afford to move residence, either. The ticket scam was one cynical cash-grab, but everything that's come to follow it has been pure, naked, avarice-driven cruelty. The sickest part is that they know exactly what they're doing. They don't *want* to retain their current staff. In their arrogance our new leadership see the current theatre management not as assets, but liabilities. Knights of the Old Republic, if you will bear with hokey Star Wars analogies, a relic of an era “before the dark times, before the Empire.” They can't Order 66 us, fire us outright in one swift mass execution, so they're doing the next best thing in their power: Altering the deal we all originally agreed to and forcing us all to resign, disgusted, but of our own accord. Once all the of experienced managers are gone, once those like myself, yammering about days gone and the way things once were, are all out of the picture and none remain who recall the Old Regal's wrongthink, Regal will be free to rewrite the status quo and hire a new generation of poor ignorant rubes to carry on their dirty work as if nothing ever happened. I don't have that much to lose if I get canned from this job, all things considered. I've worked here for six years and I've only been a manager for half of that time, but in that time I've made friends with others who have been in this position for over ten or even twenty years. When I think of them, of the time that they have given to this company, and the betrayal that they've received for their loyalty, I feel bile begin to burn the back of my throat.