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‘What’s great about this country is America started the tradition where the richest consumers buy essentially the same things as the poorest,” Andy Warhol wrote in 1975. “You can be watching TV and see Coca-Cola, and you can know that the President drinks Coke [and] you can drink Coke, too … The idea of America is so wonderful because the more equal something is, the more American it is.”
Fifty years later, it’s still true that the Diet Coke Donald Trump is chugging by the caseload in the Oval Office is exactly the same stuff his public can buy in a local shop. But the idea that mass consumerism is characterised by equality is about as dead as Warhol is. There are precious few products or experiences that haven’t been segmented into multiple tiers, from “embarrassing pauper” to “ultra-VIP”, in order to extract as much money from the consumer as possible.
Airlines are the most obvious example of this, of course. What used to be a standard experience (a free checked bag and snacks) are often now add-ons. And the airline model is steadily infiltrating other spaces, even the cinema. Paying for better seats is already common in the UK, in chains such as Odeon and Vue, but now it’s rolling out across the US. Earlier this year Adam Aron, the CEO of the cinema chain AMC, said on an earnings call that paying members of its VIP loyalty programmes will soon get priority access to seats with the best “sightline”. Which, honestly, seems a shortsighted strategy considering cinema attendance is dropping. But I don’t get paid $11m to $25m a year, depending on how shares are doing, like Aron does, so what do I know, eh?
This isn’t the first time AMC has proposed a pay-for-a-better-view plan. In 2023 it had a plan called Sightline at AMC to divide cinema seats into tiered pricing the same way concerts seats are, but ended up abandoning the strategy, partly because of the backlash. “The movie theater is and always has been a sacred democratic space for all and this new initiative by @AMCTheatres would essentially penalize people for lower income and reward for higher income,” the actor Elijah Wood tweeted at the time. (Yes, Elijah, but just think about all the beautiful shareholder value being created.) Seems weird to bring back a failed plan just a few years later, but the movie industry can’t resist a bad sequel.
Right now AMC doesn’t seem to be planning to charge extra to get seated more quickly, but perhaps that will come next. Experiences that involve queueing also now tend to include options to pay more to skip the line. Ski resorts have been implementing this and so has Disney World: you either pay up for “lightning lane” passes or spend half your day waiting in line. On a rather more serious note, the US is seeing a big rise in “concierge medicine”, also sometimes called “membership medicine”. For fees that can run as high as $50,000 a year (on top of existing health insurance costs) you get quicker access to doctors’ appointments and more time with them. Which is great for you if you can afford the membership fees but, since it diverts resources in an already strained system, pretty bad for society as a whole.
I know there are rather more important things to get upset about in the world right now than having to pay extra for a cinema seat where your nose isn’t basically touching the screen. But what’s so infuriating about AMC’s recent pricing move is that it’s part of a broader trend where, thanks to the untrammelled greed of a few people at the top, every facet of modern life is getting worse and worse for the masses while also getting more expensive.
I guess I’ve officially reached back-in-my-day-years-old, but in my 20s I used to go out all the time without spending much money. Now everything from the cinema to restaurants to bars is so expensive that it’s no wonder fewer people are going out to do things. It’s cheaper to sit at home in the dark, stare at a screen and mutter angrily to yourself. (My typical Thursday night TBH.) Give it a few years and our corporate overlords will probably find a way to charge extra for that.
Arwa Mahdawi is a Guardian columist
