The Star Tribune (Minneapolis) has an interesting story regarding a woman's bad experience at a movie theater and the theater's management's rather unorthodox response to her complaint.
Sarah Kohl-Leaf, her husband and another couple went to Saturday's 9:40 pm showing of "Shutter Island" at the St. Croix Falls Cinema in St. Croix Falls, Wisconsin.
The first problem is that the theater apparently does not accept credit cards and the lobby's ATM machine was out of cash so Mrs. Kohl-Leaf had to borrow money from her friends to buy tickets, popcorn and soda.
She further indicates that during the first five or 10 minutes of the show, a theater employee entered the theater and announced that eight people were in there who shouldn't be there so for 20 minutes, they used flashlights to check ticket stubs of all people in the theater.
Once she got home, she emailed a letter of complaint to the theater management which said in part:
"I do not pay $18.00 to have a distracted experience. I would rather drive to White Bear Lake, where they obviously know how to run a theater than have this experience again."
This is the response from Steve Payne, Vice President of Evergreen Entertainment:
"Drive to White Bear Lake and also go f@%! yourself. If you don't have money for entertainment, get a better job, and don't pay for everything on your credit or check card." Apparently it also contained a couple more expletives before ending though sadly the article did not include those gems.
What the.....?!
Man, this place sounds pretty jacked up.
1. They don't take credit cards and the ATM is empty?
2. Movie interrupted while the staff checks for people who maybe shouldn't be there? (If the movie has started and there are enough seats, I think you take a loss on those that may have snuck in)
3. The Vice President tells unhappy customers to go f@%! themselves?
Who runs this place?
Marilyn Manson?
Morton Downey's kids?
Do they have bloody tire irons behind the counter?
White Bear Lake, here we come!
6 comments:
Apparently the VP issued an apology.
Sort of like Bipping, though. Once the cat is out of the bag, hard to get it back in.
Thanks, Mark. It is interesting that The Consumerist had the emails in their entirety where the newspaper article did not and of course the entire email makes Payne look even worse.
While I was reading the apology email in the original article, my immediate thought was that Payne was probably the owner's son as he was obviously still employed at Evergreen when he wrote the apology. After reading the article, I saw one of the comments from the public to the article which confirmed that this was the case.
Nepotism sometimes is not such a good thing.
P.S.
I know that I should include links to primary sources (it would have likely saved you a search here) but I typically do not do this as I am a bit fearful that the reader will not click the link and then not bother with the rest of the post which would be dependent on information in the link.
Still haven't thought of a solution to this.
(Mark's wife here) Holy cow. Mark and I both "suffer" the benefits of nepotism. . . he works FOR family, and I work WITH family. But, I am fairly certain if either one of us wrote something like that, we'd be out on our collective. . . well, you know how that sentence would end! :)
Like your blog, by the way!
Hi Angie,
Hey nepotism is not ALWAYS bad as long as you do the work and refrain from....well THOSE type of emails.
By the way, my boys (13 & 7) tag along with me and visit Mark's blog from time to time and think Caroline is a princess.
Kevin
Kevin - Mark told me that you'd seen my response. Yeah, we've got stories (or issues) - depends on your perspective. Nepotism has worked fairly well for both of us. But, we've also had some very "interesting" family gatherings.
He's told me about your boys - fun times!
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