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Cineplex made nearly $40M from online fees at heart of competition case (globalnews.ca)
submitted 2 years ago by to c/canada@lemmy.ca
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An agreed statement of facts shows Cineplex made more than $11.6 million in the six months after the fees were implemented in mid-2022 and another $27.3 million on fees in 2023.

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[–] 10 points 2 years ago (4 children)

I'm curious if the online fees are actually used for improving the online experience. The few times I used cineplex, it felt they try to put effort into the website, considering they have subscriptions, seat selection, dynamic ticket search (based on time and seat availability).

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  • [–] 8 points 2 years ago

    It's not. The fee was added to encourage people to join in with the Cineclub thing. The back end for seat selection existed before the online reservation fee did as far as I can recall.

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  • [–] 1 point 2 years ago* (1 child)

    Their online ticket buying is atrocious.

    From last night, on a PC using Firefox:

    • crashes log in to account unless you enable all cookies for the site
    • forced 2FA to a phone number (I just hate these, it’s a way for them to steal your phone number)
    • refuses to let you buy tickets unless you re-enable all cookies for the site (and puts a countdown on that page)
    • fees are at the end of the page scroll on the 3rd or 4th page in
    • refuses to let you pay unless you add a whole-ass credit card to your account, while cookies and trackers are enabled, again with a counter

    Never have I had to disable Firefox’s onboard blocking to simply pay for something with a credit card online, I’m highly suspicious of Cineplex’s back end and the second any weird activity happens on that credit card, or email address, I’m going after them.

    They should be legally forced to use an existing well-regarded payment vendor, because whatever is going on now, they’re doing something either very incompetent, or very fishy.

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  • [–] 1 point 2 years ago (1 child)

    Why don't you use cookie auto delete? Are you explicitly blocking cross site cookies; if so, can you give more details what the cross site cookies were doing?

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  • [–] 1 point 2 years ago

    I can’t give you more information because I literally don’t know more than that.

    I’m a bitch basic internet user, and I’ve never had a site do this before, and I don’t have 3 hours to teach myself everything on the subject just for one shitty site, or to research and install whatever the current best suite of un-enshittified extensions is. I have Ublock origin running in Firefox already, so for all I know the cookies are already auto-deleting, but I really couldn’t tell you.

    If it was my card instead of someone else’s, I would have cancelled the whole thing and just picked up the tickets in person on the way home or something. Or just not given them my business (so just not seen the movie, because they have a near monopoly out here).

    I’m a mechanic, not a programmer, and at this point probably not a moviegoer again, either, because the fuss of dealing with their crap now isn’t worth seeing movies, just like we’ve basically stopped streaming anything in my household and cancelled most of the subs. Now my money can go to renovations and hobbies instead!

    In fact, the internet in general is getting to be such a pain in the ass, my usage is probably going to drop off to avoid all these headaches.

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