Movie popcorn overpriced? Sue ’em; spoiled children want their way

By David McElroy · March 6, 2012

I hate paying the high prices that movie theatres charge for snacks and drinks, but it never crossed my mind to sue anyone about it. One spoiled brat in Michigan is so upset about being deprived of his right to inexpensive popcorn and Coke, though, that he’s filed a class action lawsuit demanding lower prices.

I would simply laugh at his idiocy and childishness, but we live in a culture that caters to these sorts of irrational whims. This lawsuit will probably be dismissed, but I can see the idea behind it succeeding in the future. How long will it be before some congressman introduces legislation to create the National Theatre Snack Food Board, with the power to regulate prices?

If you think that sounds absurd, you’re right. But remember that we live in a country where Congress has passed laws regulating the acceptable volume level of television commercials. Seriously. There’s a law about it. I’m not making this up.

Many people have come to believe that life should be set up to please them. They believe that other people have a responsibilitiy to cater to them. And when reality doesn’t deliver what they want, they expect governments to give it to them.

If gasoline prices are higher than they want to pay, they rail against the evil oil companies (and commodities speculators, if they’re sophisticated enough to have even heard of them). They don’t understand the law of supply and demand — and they don’t really care about reality when they insist on plenty of what they want and prices in line with what they want to pay.

Fortunately, even politicians mostly understand that price controls don’t work, so they’re hesitant to impose them, even though they’ll join in the populist fist-shaking to appease the angry masses. After the experiments of the ’70s wage-and-price controls, some of them realize that if you artificially keep a price down, you’re going to have shortages and lines at gas stations with people angry that there’s no supply.

The guy in Michigan who’s suing for his apparent right to inexpensive popcorn doesn’t understand all of this. He and many of his fellow moviegoers don’t understand economics. They don’t understand the free market. And they don’t understand choices.

If you don’t want to buy expensive popcorn and soft drinks, then don’t buy them. There’s not a “cover charge” at the door demanding that you buy. You can either accept the total price you pay as the cost of attending a movie or you can simply not buy snacks. Of course, you also have the “nuclear option.” Just opt out of going to the theatre. Save your money. If enough others do the same, it might force a change in the economics of running theatres. Maybe.

Either way, it’s your choice. Nobody’s making you go to the theatre and nobody’s forcing you to buy the snacks. You don’t have a constitutional right to reasonably priced Junior Mints. Get over yourself.

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Why are children unhappier today than in the past? And why are today’s teens at least five times as likely to be clinically depressed as teens of 50 years ago? In this sobering article for Psychology Today, a research psychologist argues that children are being deprived of the opportunity to play on their own and take responsibility for themselves. Peter Gray is a professor at Boston College who specializes in the role of play in child development. He blames “coercive schooling” and the rise of additional adult-directed activities for taking away children’s sense of autonomy and self-ownership. Gray says this leads to anxiety and depression. I went through a very traditional system of schooling, but today’s children have even less control of their time than I did. Parents who think they are helping their children by controlling their time and giving them so many well-meaning activities are hurting them instead.

If you get here from Flipboard, you might have noticed that many of the keywords with which Flipboard tags my stories are horribly inaccurate. I’ve reported this to Flipboard, but the system is automated — and there’s nothing I can do about it. If I happen to mention something in an article, the automated algorithm at Flipboard often randomly picks that extraneous item as a tag. The article above, for instance, is about making personal changes inside yourself. I compared it to the process of renovating a crumbling old house which has been abandoned, so the Flipboard software thinks the article is about home flooring. Another recent article mentioned Tom Hanks — though it was about something entirely different — so the software tagged it as being about Hanks. So if you end up here expecting to read about flooring or about Tom Hanks, I apologize. I’m aware of the issue, but it’s a Flipboard problem beyond my control. I’ll keep looking for a way to change it if I can.

Do antidepressants work? It depends on who you ask and what standards you use. But a new Danish study concludes we just don’t know. There’s no question antidepressants make chemical changes in the brain, but the truth is that doctors don’t know enough about those brain processes to do anything more than try certain drugs and see what they do. The Danish study says that if antidepressants do help, the effects are tiny. I know plenty of people who swear they couldn’t live without their antidepressants, but the more I study about the root causes of depression, the more I suspect the placebo effect is what’s going on. Although some studies suggest these drugs have slight positive effects for some people, others argue that the positive effects are tiny — and that they cause more deaths than can be explained. There’s nothing wrong with using any drug that helps with something wrong with us — especially short term — but I’m coming to suspect that whatever good SSRIs and similar drugs do comes from masking our underlying issues, not fixing them. Denial is popular with humans, so it will be no surprise if this eventually turns out to be true.

Your brain has almost certainly tricked you into making bad romantic choices. A California psychology professor writes in Psychology Today that there are four things our brains do that cause trouble: 1) We think we know what we want — but we don’t. I’ve seen this in myself and if you haven’t seen it yet, you will. The things I wanted in a mate when I was young are completely different from what the mature version of myself wants. 2) We like more choices — as many as possible. We tend to believe that more choices lead to a better selection in all sorts of areas, but the truth is that too many choices tend to lead to the paralysis of failure to choose. 3) We try to be rational by “keeping our options open.” We’re scared to make the choices we need to make, because we’re scared of doing the wrong thing. This keeps us trapped in bad situations — and better choices eventually disappear. 4) We stay with the wrong people, because we don’t want our effort to go to waste. I’ve done this. Maybe you have, too. On several occasions, I’ve stayed in a relationship that I knew was dead and needed to end. At this point in my life, I know to trust my gut. It’s a lot smarter about most things than my conscious brain.

I just noticed that I’m approaching 3,000 subscribers for this site again. Although I’ve had plenty of individual days with far higher readership, the core of any site is those readers who are interested enough to subscribe and keep coming back. In the days when I wrote about politics, I hit 3,000 subscribers at my peak, but once I shifted focus, those subscribers started dropping like flies. These days, the readership numbers are still lower than they were when I wrote about politics, but I think it’s a better quality reader — people who are interested in something more important to long-term happiness than politics will ever be. I don’t know if I’ll hit 30,000 readers in one day anytime soon — as I did one day years ago when Rush Limbaugh and several conservative commentators linked to me — but I appreciate those of you who keep coming back again and again. I can’t thank you individually — and I don’t even know who you are — but I want you to know that I really appreciate you.

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