Conversation with a Cineworld Employee17 May 2022 23:05
Just had a brief conversation with a Cineworld worker :)
She was quite in for a chat, so asked her a few questions. For reference, I live in the West Yorkshire area, but I assume this would be the same across the country.
I asked her about pay and her treatment as an employee at the company. She said she feels she is treated well, and that the pay is decent. This matches up with what was said at the AGM and about how CINE is matching wages to inflation broadly.
Then I asked her about how the company is performing. For reference, I asked her to compare it to how the cinema was performing during Spider-Man in December. She said the cinema has been ‘busy’ in 2022 so far, and she said about 50% of Spider-Man levels.
I asked her about how the concessionary side has been going since the start of 2022. She said people are indeed still buying snacks, and that this is at about the same level it was back last year, so no major change there.
She said that Dr Strange has performed very well, which gives me good feeling for the rest of the slate we have for the year such as Top Gun.
All in all, the brief conversation I had gave me a good feeling. There were some concerns circulating here about whether concessionary income would be impacted due to the cost of living crisis, and happily that does not appear to be the case.
Worth noting that in the immediate vicinity, there is another cinema that is freshly refurbished and another cinema about 15 minutes away with recliner seats, so there is a fair bit of competition in the area. I can only assume that in areas where CINE has a monopoly, they must be performing even better.
Based on what I’ve heard, I still hold the opinion that CINE is performing below the base case and will have to seek a waiver on the covenant test next month, but it’s good to hear that CINE isn’t being too badly impacted at the moment. Indeed it actually sounds like CINE is following the trend of the cinema industry doing well during periods of financial difficulty as we saw back in 2008, as the employee said that it has in fact been busy.
Of course, I am not in the US, so no idea how they are doing. I am in frequent contact with my friend over in the US, so I’ll ask there too and provide an update once I have one.
Hope this helps :)
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