On 18 Sep 2008 at 4:00pm lewes cinema wrote:
After out first cinema weekend (Mamma Mia) since the launch of the LP I thought I would report back on our experiences.
Out of several hundred customers just 4 asked if we took the LP. To be fair that's not entirely representative as we are not listed as accepting it - and we are not accepting it at the moment.
3 of the people were perfectly fine about it and the fourth was fairly unpleasant because we would not take it. We were ready for that though. However, they still paid with 'normal' pounds and saw the film anyway - so the point of the LP is..?
I must admit that when somebody pointed out that each note has an expiry date does make us nervous about accepting them and is probably the clincher. If we accepted them and ended up with several hundred or thousand of them when they all 'expired'..
Personally I would urge everybody to support local traders and businesses (including us!) but, just do it with normal pounds please?
On 18 Sep 2008 at 10:13pm gloria mundi wrote:
LC, I'm pretty sceptical about the economic arguments for the LP, but with all its publicity, it has been a runaway success in promoting the town and independent local traders like you. The idea is that you accept them at face value from one customer and you hand them back to another as change. So, you don't end up with thousands - and if you do, you can change them back - or if you are enterprising you can sell them on eBay for a lot more than they are worth. If you won't join in a 'buy local' scheme, don't be too surprised if I use my bus pass to go to the cinema in Brighton.
On 18 Sep 2008 at 10:58pm Spinster Of This Parish wrote:
Lewes Cinema - agree entirely with your post. It's a great shame (and not very community spirited) when people threaten you for not taking the LP.
Demonstrates the mentality of the people behind it!
On 18 Sep 2008 at 11:58pm SHS wrote:
I think some people need to be a little more adventurous. Here is a free game to brighten our lives with no risk but, like a lottery ticket, with a faint but definite chance of changing Lewes life for the better. At the very least, it stimulates an important debate about the local economy. For any business, accepting it gets some free publicity and therefore more customers so I fail to see why it is refused anywhere. Incidentally, does anyone know if Waitrose and Tesco take the LP?
On 19 Sep 2008 at 1:16am lewes cinema wrote:
Gloria Mundi - how mean can you get? You might choose to go to a cinema in Brighton because we don't take the Lewes pound?? Why, do they take it at the cinemas in Brighton? YOU obviously don't want to support local businesses at all then. In fact was it you who tried to bully my ticket seller into accepting it?
Okay, more seriously, why don't we accept it SHS?
Let me just state for the record that we are not 'against' the Lewes pound - we have just chosen not to accept it for practical business reasons - if others do then good luck to them and the scheme, if it works for them. Would it help us as a business? No, we don't think so or we would be accepting it. We have just had our busiest weekend EVER and not a LP in sight to help us. Were we busy because of the publicity about the Lewes pound? No, we were busy because it was a popular film and we advertise well. We also introduced online advance booking - that made us busier still, and you guessed it, the online booking system does not accept LP's either.
Practicalities:
We have to get anything up to 200 people through the doors in a VERY short period of time to keep all the films on schedule. Asking each and every one of the 1000 or so people who came in last weekend if they wanted a LP as part of their change would inevitably slow things down - not acceptable.
It means extra admin - unless there are always more people willing to accept it as change than spend it then we would always end up with a surplus of LP's. At some point we would have to change these into sterling. The film companies do not accept LP's. We have to pay a lot of rent to the Town Council to hire the All Saints and the council don't accept them either.
So, unless somebody from TTL is willing to exchange all the surplus LP's at 11pm on a Sunday evening we would have to travel into Lewes on a Monday just to change LP's.
To be honest - I was expecting some people to be hostile because we don't take it (and obviously I am laying myself open to hostile comments by posting here) but in the end it was only one person who let everybody down by being hostile, so not as bad as I feared.
We DO support local trade Gloria Mundi - we are part of the local trade that generates local wealth! We just think that local trade can be supported equally well by providing what people want in exchange normal money. And we don't respond well to bullying..
On 19 Sep 2008 at 1:25am lewes cinema wrote:
I just want to clarify that nobody from the TTL group or from the Lewes pound group has put us under any pressure whatsoever to take the LP - only a member of the public.
In fact TTL asked us very nicely - but as above, it's just not practical for us.
On 19 Sep 2008 at 8:41am gloria mundi wrote:
Clearly the Brighton cinemas won't accept the Lewes 'currency' and if we have to pay in real money to go to the cinema, why not choose to go to a proper cinema with comfortable seats? I think you are making really heavy weather of this and it wouldn't do you any harm to try it out for a short while before deciding one way or the other.
On 19 Sep 2008 at 9:03am Frak wrote:
Spinster, i don't see how one person being a bit arsey 'demonstrates the mentality of the people behind it'?
On 19 Sep 2008 at 9:07am Dave wrote:
If a firm or business won't accept the Lewes pound you could always use old fashioned pound sterling.
but why not use the max amount of small coins and notes.
Listed below is the amount you can use as legal tender anymore and they can tell you to get out.
mix and match though just to create max coinage.
5 (post-1990 crown) unlimited
2 unlimited
1 unlimited
50p 10
25p (pre-1990 crown) 10
20p 10
10p 5
5p 5
2p 20p
1p 20p
One downfall though is the shop will then need huge arctic lorries to do the banking which use diesel etc
which brings me to my next point the lewes pound is printed on paper covered in ink and other chemicals
and delivered to the shops and banks by road how green is that really.
kinda knackers the ethos of the green Lewes Pound
i'm gonna Stick to my green credit card ok so it may use a nats whisker more energy to process but I do online banking online statements so i never use a bit of diesel in my transactions how green am I.
On 19 Sep 2008 at 10:08am Elvis the Gunslinger wrote:
Lewes Pounds being sold by Lewes residents for upto a tenner a go on Fleebay has bought more money into the local community - the Lewes Pound is a rip roaring success.
The more people expolit it, the more money will end up in the community. Maybe not what the organisers had in mind, and they will probably we choking on their organic monkey nut coffee in a mug wittled by Columbian drug compound guards during their down time. TTL I salute you in a PC non-oppressive non-militaristic way.
On 19 Sep 2008 at 12:33pm SHS wrote:
Excellent feedback Lewes Cinema. Hope that info filters through to TTL & clearly some refinements are needed. Now we need a Lewes Five-Pound, a Lewes Bank and a Lewes Visa card. How long before the govt get worried and try to put a stop to our enterprise I wonder?
On 20 Sep 2008 at 2:21pm lewes cinema wrote:
Thank you SHS.
Obviously if there are 85 businesses accepting it in Lewes then there are many, many hundreds who are not. I'm the only one to come on here and say why we don't accept it. So again, thanks SHS for constructive comments. Now, if we could accept LP's online and the conversion process was automated, who knows..
To others, don't shoot the messenger because you don't like the message.
Gloria Mundi - clearly not a regular at Lewes Cinema? We have comfy cinema seats in the balcony which we installed at out own expense a few years back. Downstairs the seats are hard - but that's not down to me I'm afraid.
Gloria, I have already explained the practical and business reasons for not accepting the LP - neither I or anybody else can (or want to) convince you to support a local cinema (or other local business) or not - that is your choice entirely - as it is our current choice not to accept the LP.
Your views make it fairly clear that you would probably choose to go to Brighton anyway, and that's fair enough - and therefore from a business point of view nothing has been lost to us by not accepting the LP.
Our view remains that local businesses can be supported by using pounds sterling - that can also be used in any other business in Brighton or elsewhere.
I think as somebody said elsewhere far more business for local traders could have been generated if the money spent on the LP had been used to campaign long and hard against the parking scheme - that does not fit-in with some people's principles but it's a fact.
On 21 Sep 2008 at 2:47am lopster wrote:
my sad sols sport is too easty this time of night - I shall stay sober next week and just say no
On 26 Sep 2008 at 10:05pm SG wrote:
I work in Holland & Barrett's in the town, and even we've had a couple of people ask if we take it. I had to explain to one very rude woman that surely spending it in an American store would completely defeat the point?
On 30 Sep 2008 at 6:39pm Dave Molz wrote:
ahh if only it wewre so simple and there was some guilt and carbon free way of banking
online banking is NOT zero carbon - server farms where your information is stored are nootoriously power hungry and every byte of data sent or received on the interweb has a carbon footprint!
google it and you can find out just how much (gedditt!!!)
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