Basic Trope: Forbidding outside food and drink to sell your overpriced stuff.
- Straight: Mona's Movie Theater forbids outside food and drink so it can charge you $20 for a small popcorn and soda.
- Exaggerated: Mona's Movie Theater charges $100 for a tiny bag of popcorn and a glass of water.
- Downplayed: Mona's Movie Theater charges $10 for a soda and a nice amount of popcorn — still a bit more expensive than elsewhere, but not too bad.
- Justified: There are reasons why Mona's Movie Theater charges a lot of money for food and drink products:
- Most of the income from tickets go to the studios, and Mona needs to make money somehow.
- Mona could afford to decrease the prices just fine, but she's too greedy to do it.
- Mona is aiming for the Conspicuous Consumption crowd and hoping to pass off her snacks as luxurious.
- Mona's Movie Theater is high-end, so Mona figures that if you go there in the first place, you're probably fine with dropping a lot of money on snacks.
- Inverted: Mona's Movie Theater encourages outside snacks because it didn't want to bother with a concession stand.
- Subverted: Mona's Movie Theater charges $15 for a medium popcorn. However, it's gourmet popcorn that's so delicious that people don't mind paying $15 for it, and you are allowed to bring outside snacks if you don't want to spend $15 on popcorn...
- Double Subverted: ...we later find out that Mona heavily exaggerated how luxurious the popcorn was, and that while she doesn't have an explicit "no outside food and drink" rule, she still encourages an environment where you'll be looked down upon for not buying her expensive popcorn.
- Parodied:
- The concession stand uses the slogan "The overpriced snacks we force you to buy!"
- A sporting event intended to promote a healthy lifestyle partners with WcDonald's, and then decides to exclusively serve WcDonald's fast food and forbid spectators from bringing other food or drink.
- Zig-Zagged: Mona wants to push healthy snacks, so the popcorn and soda are expensive, but the fruits, the vegetable sticks and the water aren't.
- Averted:
- Mona's Movie Theater sells expensive snacks, but doesn't bother with a "no outside food and drink" rule.
- Mona's Movie Theater sells cheap or reasonably priced snacks.
- Enforced:
- Lampshaded: "You said the popcorn costs how much?!"
- Invoked:
- Exploited: Mona's competitors use "we have reasonably priced snacks" as a selling point.
- Defied: Mona is committed to not raising the prices of snacks too much, and instead tries to make or save money in other places.
- Discussed: Alice suggests going to Mona's Movie Theater, and Bob expresses concern that they may not be able to afford snacks.
- Conversed: A viewer says, "I know movie theater popcorn is expensive, but this is ridiculous."
- Implied: Alice decides to go to the movie theater, takes one look at the popcorn prices and decides that she's going to smuggle in snacks.
- Played for Laughs:
- Alice goes through a lot of trouble to sneak in outside popcorn... and her effort is close to useless, as we later find out that she prepared by buying overpriced popcorn at a funfair instead.
- Alice brings a bottle of Pipsi Cola from home, and successfully argues that she didn't break the rules because the rule said "no outside food and drink", and she only had outside drink.
- Alice brings a bag of popcorn from home, and gets away with it by insisting that popcorn counts as "snacks", not "real food".
- Alice and Bob bring snacks from home. The usher tells them they can't eat their own snacks, so they shrug, exchange their snacks and eat them.
- Played for Drama:
- The work focuses on how the snack vendor gets abused by customers over the overpriced snacks even though the prices are out of their control.
- The work focuses on how Mona is affected by the backlash against her high snack prices, and highlights that she didn't really have any better options to stay in the black.
Go buy a $10 popcorn over at Snacksploitation.
