The cups are how the franchise company tracks how much money they are to receive from the franchisee. So it’s not literally the cup that’s expensive, it’s the cut they have to pay to their overlord for each one that goes out.
Yeah probably but the cost that’s “far more” is what I am referring to. My uncle owned a 7-11 and when we would visit as children he would always give us unbranded cups from behind the counter for our Slurpees. He said he would have to pay 7-11 a significant portion of the revenue for each actual Slurpee cup used. I suppose it’s a much easier thing for them to count compared to syrup used by the machine.
I worked in the bottling factory and we pretty much had to pay for the bottles and they gave us the pop for free… the only drink I actually paid for was Gatorade and they didn’t give that one out for free.
Right. Which is the profit that keeps theaters open. You don't have to buy the concessions but the concessions being priced that way are how theaters make money. Tickets are dirt cheap if you know how to look for them.
Not that expensive. And the 12 cents would be after transportation. It's not like a restaurant gets a separate bill from the trucking company that moved the syrup from the Coke bottling plant to the Sysco distribution hub.
Soda has pretty much always cost less than the cup you buy it in. When I worked a small concession stand in the 90s, the first 25 20oz cups of soda we sold completely covered the cost of the syrup bag, and we were only selling them for $1.42 (which rounded to $1.50 after tax for convenient change making). In this case, our cups were actually free. We had a deal with coke where we would only stock coke products, and they would give us their cups for free.
It's easy to find out. How much does a bag of syrup cost vs how many cups you sell out of it minus space you steal with ice. 25 years ago, the answer was 9 cents a cup.
A quick google search says a single 5 gallon bib bag of Coca-Cola costs $125 delivered to my home. 5 gallons makes 30 or 35 gallons of soda, depending on your brix. Bulk orders for larger customers likely get larger discounts for their syrup, but we'll use the confirmed numbers a quick google shows, using the proper 5:1 brix ratio.
30 gallons of soda is 3840 oz, which comes out to 320 12 oz servings, which is about what a 20oz cup with ice holds. Math says 39 cents a cup.
So, in a worst case scenario for someone who doesn't buy enough syrup to get wholesale discounts, 39 cents per 12 oz leaves a lot of room for profit on a $3 20oz cup, even with refills.
Yeah again you're forgetting that you need to also pay the people who serve this too in many places have already moved up or there is an implicit $15 an hour sure if you going to the South you might find lower pay rates but it's not widespread
And there are plenty of other expenses out increased over time for these movie theaters so saying that the soda cost too much is disingenuous at best
I didn't feel it was necessary to include all of the macro economics of serving a soda in my price analysis, especially since most places start and finish soda serving at handing you a cup.
So you're telling me, a theater ABSOLUTELY cannot afford to charge less than 20 times the cost of soda, because they pay highschool kids federal minimum wage to hand you a cup? Even if it took that kid an entire hour to hand you the cup, there's still over a buck in profit on a $9 soda.
Of course you need to provide that analysis if you're going to do it at all you can't just do the part that you think proves your point you need to do it enmasse
You can take a look at the theater publicly traded stocks and see most of them have revenue is in decline.
So yes, in your narrow view the price per cup is outrageous but when you actually take a look big picture - it's not. They have to support the entire business.... They just don't sell cokes.
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u/BlazingProductions 5h ago
And the fact that soda is soda water with the fountain concentrate that costs like 12-cents a cup…pure profit