PP
Paul Pollock
Nov 15, 2025
Tonight I visited Marcus Hollywood Cinema solely because of their one day ninety cent large soda promotion for their 90th anniversary. This was a limited, today only special, and the entire reason I chose to attend on a full price night rather than my normal Tuesday visit. On Tuesdays the movie is six dollars, they give free popcorn, and I buy a large soda without issue. The anniversary promotion brought me in, and what I received instead was a complete failure of basic customer service and a clear disregard for consumer rights.
The teenager behind the counter attempted to ring up the transaction, the system showed it could not run a charge under one dollar, and rather than seeking help or doing his job, he simply handed me my card back and treated it as my problem. This alone is unacceptable. When a business advertises a one day promotional price, they are obligated to honor it. Passing the burden onto the customer is not only unprofessional, it is a violation of common sense and basic retail standards.
Because the employee was unwilling to help, I asked for the manager. The manager struggled with the transaction as well, even after I offered a reasonable solution. I told him to charge one dollar and return the five cents, since the total with tax was ninety five cents. Instead of applying a simple workaround, he tried once, failed, and then dismissed me entirely. No attempt to honor the advertised price, no alternative solution, no effort to retain a paying customer. For the record, refusing to process a small transaction and imposing a minimum charge violates Visa’s merchant agreement, which they are required to follow if they choose to accept Visa cards at all. There is no ambiguity in the rules, and the failure to comply is not a “technical issue,” it is a policy violation.
I have spent over three hundred dollars at this location in the past three months alone. Yet tonight, the manager and employee chose to lose a loyal customer over ninety cents, all while running a promotion designed to attract guests. They failed to honor their advertisement, they failed to follow their own merchant obligations, and they failed to provide even a minimal level of customer care.
This was not a misunderstanding, it was incompetence. And it was a complete failure of management.
I will be contacting Marcus corporate on Monday, because this level of disregard for customers is unacceptable, and it deserves to be addressed by someone with authority, since clearly the management at this location does not possess it.
Marcus Hollywood Cinema lost my business tonight, permanently.