Yahoo Finance Overdue Idea: The Movie Theatre Daycare
THE ISSUE: Deciding to have kids means giving up a LOT. In no particular order, say goodbye to: sleeping in, driving anything cool, buying nice things, you know what I’m talking about. It also means pretty much giving up to the idea of seeing first-run movies in an actual theatre (good luck avoiding spoilers on the latest Hunger Games flick while you wait for it on iTunes).
Sure, you can get a babysitter, but that can often logistical nightmare, not to mention an additional 40-buck hit. So you say goodbye to those spur-of-the-moment weekday movie outing, or the Friday night horror flick that now takes a week of planning to make happen.
THE VICTIMS: There seems to be a cult of privation regarding parents these days. “Pricey childcare? Too bad, you chose to have had kids. No social life? Live with it.” Well, that ends here. It’s time daycare moved to the multiplex.
Sure, some theatres have ‘mommy days’, with low-volume PG romantic comedies that you can barely hear over the screaming babies. These are half measures, and don’t really help the armies of parents stuck in basement suffering through Frozen for the 17th time with the kids.
THE FIX: Some companies have already clued in that parents need a bit of independence. IKEA got the memo years ago, and its stores feature in-store supervised areas where kids play while parents wander the store with pagers to let them know when Kayden barfed in the ball pit. Let’s teleport this to the movie theater.
Parents could leave the kids and take the pagers into the theater with them. Better yet, there could be a CCTV setup that feeds to a smart phone app.
But who’s going to pay for this, you say. Going to a movie is pricey, but we still buy the overpriced popcorn, right? There’s something about it being part of the experience that makes it hurt a bit less than the two twenties the babysitter pockets for watching TV for four hours (no disrespect to sitters, they do a darn fine job. Mostly). So sell snacks for the kids while they’re in the daycare. Charge theatre prices for fruit juice and muffins, which should bring in more than enough profit to pay for the staff and space.
This is a “Field of Dreams” thing; build it and they will come. Cinemas are fighting to protect the ground they’re losing to online and at-home competition. There is massive market of former moviegoers who have drifted into the reeds after having kids. But they’re out there. Give them a chance, and they’ll come back.
