AMC Changes “$5 Tuesdays” To “Discount Tuesdays”, Raises Price up to $7 in Some Markets

AMC Theaters, the largest movie theater chain in the United States, has had Tuesday as its nationwide discount day. AMC Stubs members, including ones who had a free membership, were eligible for $5 standard 2D tickets every Tuesday and reduced prices for premium tickets.

Now, AMC has begun to raise that price. The company’s CEO Adam Aron mentioned the price uptick in a conference call this Thursday:

We call it Discount Tuesday, which launched nationwide at $5 on Tuesdays and turned Tuesday into the second biggest attendance day of the week at AMC. Actually, when we launched the program last year, we called it $5 Tuesdays. We renamed it Discount Tuesdays at the beginning of 2019 because very quietly we’ve been taking price increases on Tuesday pushing Tuesday from $5 to anywhere between $5 and $7 depending upon the theater.

AMC’s website currently states that it charges $6 on Tuesdays in some states and $5 or less in others. The states that have seen the price uptick are California, Connecticut, Georgia, Illinois, Massachusetts, Maryland, New Jersey, New York, Virginia as well as the District of Columbia.

According to Aron’s comments, that price should go up to $7 sometime soon. Further, the company’s CEO announced planned innovations to the A-List program. Currently, the age limit for A-List is set at 16 due to the need for ID verification to avoid fraud. That leaves many families who’d like to take their children out of the picture. A change to that verification process plans to address this.

Every time an A-Listers shows up at our theater, we require that they show us a government-issued photo ID, which generally is a driver’s license. And obviously, if you are under the age of 16, it’s not going to be so easy to get a driver’s license. We’ve done this because we wanted from day one to make sure there was not fraud within the A-List program. Others in subscription who failed pretty spectacularly were saying that they saw a massive fraud because they were not checking identification and people were passing their cards around.

The changes AMC plans would permit families to share a plan by replacing the need for government ID verification with photo uploads. Eliminating the need for government IDs would in turn open up the A-List program to AMC guests under the age of 16.

I’m also pleased to say that we are working right now to program family membership capability within our website and app. And essentially what we’re going to do is program a photo upload capability, so that you can store your picture with us so you won’t have to show us the government ID for us to know that you are actually the member because we’ll have your picture loaded on file and while you will be able to change your picture from time to time, it will be infrequently. So maybe once a year or something, so that we don’t open ourselves up to fraud.

When we have the photo upload capability, that will then allow us to lower the minimum age down to let family members enroll not only for a husband and wife but also for their children. So that’s — and that’s yet another one of these bells and whistle adds to A-List coming down the pipe that will make A-List even more attractive to more people, which I think will cause it to continue to grow as a program into the future. But I wouldn’t be surprised if that photo upload capability is a 2020 initiative rather than something that will happen this year in 2019.

According to Aron, there are currently 787,342 A-List members. That program has also seen a price increase in some states.

While “Discount Tuesday” doesn’t quite have the same ring to it as “$5 Tuesday”, it’s not the only change being made at the company.

According to one source, all AMC locations with the exception of AMC Classics theaters are expected to offer reserved seating by this Memorial Day. In addition, some locations such as AMC Lincoln Square and Empire 25 have moved to reduce human box office interactions by replacing clerks with multiple vending machines.

An ad for AMC’s Discount Tuesday, found on its website. It is promoting the $5 ICEE + Popcorn combo, which is exclusive for Tuesdays.

Source: Motley Fool Transcribers

Image credit: RB7