Who Made Movie Popcorn?
By PAGAN KENNEDY OCT. 4, 2013
In the 1920s, movie palaces rose up around the country like so many portals into a glamorous world. After you bought a ticket, you might pass through gilded archways and ascend a grand staircase lighted by a crystal chandelier to find your velvet seat. Eating was not meant to be part of the experience, says Andrew F. Smith, author of “Popped Culture: A Social History of Popcorn in America.” Theater owners feared that audiences would strew popcorn and peanuts on those crimson carpets. They hung signs discouraging people from bringing in food from vendors parked outside and didn’t sell it themselves.
A widow named Julia Braden in Kansas City, Mo., was one of the rare concessionaires who managed to talk her way inside. She persuaded the Linwood Theater to let her set up a stand in the lobby and eventually built a popcorn empire. By 1931, she owned stands in or near four movie theaters and pulled in more than $14,400 a year — the equivalent of $336,000 in today’s dollars. Her business grew even in the midst of the Depression, at the same time that thousands of elegant theaters went bust.
According to Smith, it’s impossible to establish who sold the first box of movie popcorn. For decades, vendors operated out of wagons parked near theaters, circuses and ballparks, selling a variety of snacks. But Braden seems to have been among the first to set up concessions linked to movie houses — and to pioneer a new business strategy: the money was in popcorn, not ticket sales. (That’s still true today. Movie theaters reap as much as 85 percent of their profits from concession sales.)
In the mid-1930s, a manager named R. J. McKenna, who ran a chain of theaters in the West, caught on to this idea. An old man selling popcorn outside one of McKenna’s movie houses amassed enough money to buy a house, a farm and a store. McKenna installed a popcorn machine in the lobby and collected the proceeds — as much as $200,000 in 1938. With that kind of money rolling in, who cared about the rugs? McKenna lowered the price of tickets just to draw more people to his concession stand. By the 1940s, most theaters had followed suit, and soon the smell of melted butter wafted through lobbies. One entrepreneur of the era offered the following advice:
“Find a good popcorn location and build a theater around it.”
http://www.nytimes.com/2013/10/06/magazine/who-made-movie-popcorn.html
Why Do We Eat Popcorn at the Movies?
Popcorn is just as economically important to the modern movie theater as it was to movie theaters of old. Patrons often complain about the high prices of movie concessions, but there's an economic basis for this: popcorn, cheap to make and easy to mark-up, is the primary profit maker for movie theaters.
Movie theaters make an estimated 85 percent profit off of concession sales, and those sales constitute 46 percent of movie theater's overall profits.
And so the history of popcorn and the movies was written in stone—sort of. In recent years, luxury theaters have begun popping up around the country–and they're reinventing the popcorn-snack model. These theaters offer an old school approach to the movies, trying to make the experience of attending a movie theater tantamount to going to a live show (much like the earliest movie theater owners once tried to do). As Hamid Hashemi, the CEO of iPic Theaters, a luxury theater chain with nine locations, says, "Think about going to a live Broadway show—our movie theaters provide that kind of experience. The average time spent in the theater at our theaters is around four hours." iPic Theaters still provide popcorn to patrons, but their focus is on a more gourmet level of movie theater dining, offering a menu of larger, cooked items like sliders and flatbreads.
Even as the demand for luxury theaters increases, Hashemi doesn’t think popcorn will ever be phased out.
"Popcorn is the cheapest thing you can make, and to a lot of people it has that ritualistic experience," he says, suggesting that for movie theater owners, a cheap snack never loses its golden appeal.
http://www.smithsonianmag.com/arts-culture/why-do-we-eat-popcorn-at-the-movies-475063/?no-ist