Later this summer, you could be walking into a movie theater to see the next smash hit — but you may not be walking in with your favorite coffee in hand.
AMC Entertainment, which has already reopened theaters outside the United States after a global coronavirus-related shutdown, said this week it intends to reopen in the U.S. by July in markets it can open in.
AMCs remain closed here locally even though movie theaters can open to 50 percent capacity as part of being in Florida’s Phase II of ‘Smart, Safe’ Re-Opening. The company is currently planning to reopen almost all of its U.S. and U.K. theaters in July in time for the Warner Brothers release of Christopher Nolan’s Tenet slated for release on July 17 and Disney’s Mulan on July 24.
Weeks ago, AMC reported it might not see the other side of the COVID-19 pandemic. Locally, AMC operates the movie theater at Disney Springs.
On the flip side, Starbucks evolved during the pandemic from the place to go to sit and have a coffee to a place to go grab a coffee through a drive-thru or grab-and-go counter, says it’s in the process of closing 400 stores in the United States and Canada, including about 1 in 6 north of the border.
The chain’s early plain is to expand 300 of its drive-thru and mobile-only pickup locations and add a separate counter for mobile orders to certain high volume stores.
According to CNN, about 80 percent of transactions at Starbucks’ 15,000 stores have been “on-the-go” purchases, forcing the company to re-think its space. Same-store sales in the last week of May were down 32 percent when compared with the same week in 2019 even though it has reopened 95 percent of the stores it shut down in March to comply with social-distancing and ‘slow the spread’ mandates.
