Dear Odeon,
I went out last night with friends to see Ted. I'd not been to the cinema for a long time so I thought I'd treat myself and the fiancé to a film.
Firstly, £21 for 2 tickets and a medium 7UP! I don't know who you expect to get into your cinemas but they must have more money than sense as this is ludicrous. I could go onto Play or Amazon and buy myself about 12 DVD's for that price!
Secondly, the place was dead. I can only attribute this to your insane ticket prices.... There were more staff than paying customers. "You'll have been served quickly then" you may ask. Well, no. There were 4 staff behind the counter, 2 of whom I can only assume we're there to play with a cloth and talk about pointless crap with their teenage colleagues whilst watching 4 people becoming more and more irate in the queue. Even more annoying was, despite the plethora of school-drop-out 'staff' that were milling about trying to look busy and achieving the square root of nothing, no-one came into our screen so we had to pull the doors shut ourselves. Trivial you may think but, hey, I shelled out £20 for the 'cinema experience' so I expect to actually get it.
Thirdly, I think it's ever so nice of Odeon to give their cinema goers 2 movies for the price of one because, whenever there was a part in Ted that has little or no dialogue, we were all treated to the wall shaking sound of Batman being played in the next screen but, come on, why not charge half as much and we could SEE both rather than watching one and hearing two.
Your little advert about piracy killing film was the final straw though. Between us in the group we paid you over £45 so four of us could get the 'cinema experience.' Considering the way the country is don't you think this is excessive? Especially when I could go out, by a DVD, buy a lot of 7UP, buy everyone food and have change for the same price, AND I could watch the DVD over and over to my hearts content. I know that I wouldn't get the whole 'experience' but I'm sure I could pay a spotty teenager to ignore me and leave my lounge door open so I at least feel little like I'm in an Odeon.
If you want to see more people in your cinemas and actually put a dent in film piracy you should really try and cut your prices, hire decent staff and forget the 600% profit margins on your food and drink.
You are putting plenty of nails into the cinema coffin Odeon. I won't be back in a hurry.
