Pros
As far as benefits go, employees that work an average of 20+ hours per week for 6+ months get free Cablevision services, so my Cablevision bill has gone from nearly $200 per month to about $40 per month. This includes free IO Gold Package and discounts with Optimum Online and Optimum Voice. You also get to see free movies virtually whenever you want at any Clearview Cinema location (except for top-selling movies on top-selling nights). Additionally, you get to see early screenings of movies so long as a manager or projectionist is willing to watch as well. Free movie posters. Free popcorn and soda. Selling combos at the concession stand earns you 20 cents per. This can usually add up to 15-30 extra dollars on a paycheck if you work concession a lot, but when special limited time combos come, we get nothing. Employees are given a bi-annual progress report that their theater manager goes over with them in great detail. It lets them know their own strengths, weaknesses, and management's satisfaction. Along with this, employees get a raise typically ranging from 1 cent to 30 cents, so the difference between your salary when you start and your salary after a year won't be terribly different, but it's easy to get. Friendly working environments. Since a theater generally only has about 10-15 people working in it (2-3 managers, projectionist, 8-10 staff, janitor) it is very easy to get to know the people you work with. The job requires cooperation and teamwork, so making friends comes naturally. Business is always extremely busy or extremely slow, rarely in between. When it's busy, time goes by fast and the shift is over before you know it. When it's slow, it feels slow and can get boring, but you always have the co-workers there to make things that much more fun. The job is generally easy to learn and execute.
Cons
The starting salary is minimum wage ($7.15 here) and it's really not worth the work that goes into it. Requested time off is rarely acknowledged. There's no chance of getting Christmas off, Thanksgiving off, or any other major holiday off because those are the peak movie theater business hours. Your weekday is everyone else's weekend, and your weekend is everyone else's weekday. Friday, Saturday, and Sunday are the busiest days. Tuesday is also busy due to the company's Optimum Rewards program, in which customers that have all-3 Cablevision services are given 2 free movie tickets. This isn't some store where people come and go. Customers wait on long line after long line and are very irritable towards employees. Although we've learned to laugh it off, it does get irritating when 100 people come with the same complaint to us as we're trying to fix it. Since the auditoriums are usually filled with anywhere from 50-200 people, it's impossible to keep everyone happy. One person complains it's too hot, the next complains it's too cold. Too loud, can't hear it. Popcorn's too salty, not salty enough. The customer age group is as wide as can be. Parents bring newborns with the rest of their kids and cause nothing but trouble, so we get complaints from the older folks that are just trying to walk from one side of the lobby to the other, but keeping getting bumped into by a running, screaming child. Kids movies sell the most tickets, sell the most food, and are the dirtiest. Theaters get filthy, with every single row filled with massive amounts of popcorn, spilled soda, spilled slushies, and sometimes even vomit. This wouldn't be much of a problem if it was one movie showing per day, but there is always another one coming up, usually in under an hour. It's very difficult to clean the auditorium completely in time for the next movie, so sometimes a bit of a mess is still left. There's tons of garbage that needs to be handled every weekend, and everyone is responsible for taking care of it. This can be a fun few minutes to spend with your co-workers, but at the end of the day (literally) you're just taking garbage to a dumpster. Everything in a movie theater is expensive, so people will always complain. Whenever a District Manager comes in to visit the environment takes a complete 180. There is no communication between the DM and staff, because the DM treats the staff like scum. While these visits are rare, they are painful each time. Technically speaking, the Point-of-Sale system is awful. Since ticket and concession sales are done through a computer, if the electricity, internet, or Radiant systems go down we're screwed. We can't just let people in and sell them food without punching everything in perfectly, because we only have a very limited amount of seats to sell and we keep track of everything we sell at concession. Every piece of candy, every bag of popcorn, and every cup of soda is counted at the end of the night and the amount we have must go hand-in-hand with what we sold. Since the groups of customers we serve at a time are in very large quantities, the mob mentality is very legit. Whenever something goes wrong it can be very scary and the police are always called to help with crowd control.