Is Theatre Oversupplied or Underdemanded?

A couple weeks ago, I had an interesting discussion with @aaronmandersen on Twitter about supply and demand in the world of theatre. His contention, if I’m stating it correctly, is that the market for theatre is in equilibrium. Yet, many taking part in the discussion felt that surely, theatre was either oversupplied or underdemanded.  I told him I’d think about the topic, and so I have, Aaron.

The first thought is this:  of course, the market is in equilibrium.  That’s how markets work unless distorted by some external force.  For example, if the government forcibly took $1000 from every family in Illinois and created a fund to pay actors in small non-profit theatres in Chicago $250,000 per year, that would create a tremendous distortion of the market.  What would the outcome be?  At first, the actors, who are used to working for basically nothing, would be delighted, but about a nanosecond later, they’d realize it had become harder than ever, and perhaps impossible, to get a job acting in a small theatre in Chicago.  That’s an externality that would distort the market.

But let’s assume no major distortions are influencing the market.  What markets do is find sea level.  It turns out that a lot of people would like to make a living as an actor because it’s more fun and engaging than filling out TPS reports for Lumberg in the bowels of the Initech office.  The fact that so many people are willing to work for so little in the theatre is a testament to the fact that lots of people find this compelling as a career choice.

Note that this doesn’t bear any necessary relationship to the number of people who find theatre compelling as a way to spend their money in the marketplace.  I love to golf, but very, very few people are going to pay to watch me do it, unless they want a chuckle and don’t have a youtube account so they can watch Merton instead.

So for the sake of argument, go with me on the equilibrium thing because there’s a bigger question afoot.  Why do people feel that there’s either a supply or demand problem in theatre?  No one asks is hand soap is oversupplied or under-demanded.  What’s underneath this desire to say that something is out of whack?

Every marketer who’s ever worked for me (and not just the marketers who’ve worked for me) is familiar (read: sick of hearing) a three word phrase that I would like to insert in this discussion, and here it is:

Compared to What?

Under-demanded, for example, compared to what?  If there’s not enough demand, by what standard, exactly, is it not enough?  If there’s too much supply, what do you mean by that?  Too much to ensure every participant in the market a good living?  Perhaps.  Certainly not too much to be able to claim that there’s a theatre “product” out there for all consumers.  Is either of those an important measuring stick?

Well, that’s entirely up to you.

And that’s the point.  It’s all really about what we want.  I say that there’s not as much demand in the marketplace for live entertainment because it’s my desire that the industry grow.   That more people go see live entertainment, including theatre.  I don’t take the marketplace as a given.  We have to grow it, and that’s why I’ve devoted the last 8 years of my life to getting people out more (and a few million tickets later, I’m happy to say I feel we’ve been able to do that.)

So when you think about this issue, the question isn’t whether there’s too much supply or not enough demand.  By definition, the market is Goldilocks:  just right.  The real question is what do we want it to be and what are we going to do to see that come true?

My answer is simple:  I want the industry to grow in every way.  I believe people want live entertainment more than they actually manage to consume it, and that’s on us in the industry.  The good news in that is that we can change it.

Who’s with me?

Quick Draw-Average Price Per Ticket and Why You Shouldn’t Use it

Jet Blue’s Steven Slater Is a Hero of Absolutely Nothing

Shallow and childish.

Not Steven Slater.  The people who are celebrating him.  Although he pretty well fits that description too.

What about his actions are worthy of praise?  I was reading some comments in support of him that said “hey, it’s great that he spoke his mind!”  Is it really so great that he spoke his mind?  What was the outcome?  He threw a tantrum, spoke abusively to a whole plane full of people, who in buying a ticket on Jet Blue, were paying his salary, and severely inconvenienced not just the people on the plane, but everybody delayed by what followed to get the plane back in working condition and out of the way of traffic.

A passenger abused him verbally.  Well, by all means, make the situation much, much worse, Mr. Slater.  Feel free to make hundreds of unrelated people pay the price for your hurt feelings.  Because what’s important here is that you express how you feel.

But not just verbally.  Oh, no.  Do it with actions that are dangerous, dramatic and really make life hard on a bunch of people who’ve done absolutely nothing to you.

If you think this is heroism, you’re nuts.  If you run an organization and can muster even a mild affection for your customers, he’s a great object lesson in what’s wrong with customer service in places like Jet Blue (and Jet Blue is far from the worst airline in this way.)  His greatest desire is to stop treating you nicely and start treating you the way he’d really like to, which is with contempt.  The veil came off for a moment, and now you know how somebody like Steven Slater really feels about you.

And while we’re at it, this isn’t about the customer “always being right.”  That’s not a philosophy I teach because the customer can be abusive, the customer can be drunk, the customer can be a lot of very wrong things.  The philosophy I do teach is that you can’t win an argument with a customer, because if you’re in an argument with a customer, you’ve already both lost.  If Jet Blue or Steven Slater’s philosophy is that the way to deal with difficult customers is to smile and “let them win,” then this is not surprising.  One of the weaker minded people on the staff is going to crack and doing something stupid and futile like this, eventually.

Yes, customer service can be stressful, and the added dimension of close quarters in an airplane add another dimension to it, but this has nothing to do with that.  This is how Steven Slater, in his many, many years of serving customers on an airline, has always wanted to act.

How sad is that?  To think of spending your life waiting for that moment when it was acceptable to behave how you really want to behave instead of how you’re forced to behave is depressing.  But the question is then, why do it?  Why spend decades giving people phony grins and sniping at them when they’re out of earshot when you’re standing in the galley?  Just do something else.  Just live a different life that doesn’t require so much lying to get by.

Even if the passenger, as some have said,  injured Slater with her bag, this is still a destructive response.  Obviously, the injury wasn’t bad enough for him to spend a lot of energy putting on quite a show in the moments that followed.

On the plus side, the Steven Slater story does give us the opportunity to talk about what customer service is and isn’t.  It isn’t: sycophantically pretending to care about customers until you feel you’ve “earned the right” to abuse everyone around you.  It is: actually caring about people and having the grace under pressure to know that when things go wrong, the right answer is never to purposefully make them worse.

Problem Solving at Goldstar

Nothing beats the Goldstar Doppler 5000.