How I spoiled MoviePass, by the numbers

Iam the

reason MoviePass is having trouble. Me and people like me, that is.

Pretty soon, it might have to be called MoviePast — the company that used to allow customers to see a movie a day for as little as $7.50 a month until it became so popular that it went out of business.

This is like the old “I Love Lucy” episode. She and Ethel were losing money on every bottle of salad dressing sold but were going to make a profit via volume. That’s the formula for going broke. MoviePass charged me an $89.95 annual fee up front at the end of last November. I could have paid $9.95 a month, or $119.40 a year — but what can I say? I’m cheap.

Every time I saw a movie and used my MoviePass, the company would pay the theater the full price of a ticket — say $12.

According to MoviePass data, I have seen 54 movies since last November. Yes, I forced myself to go to movies I didn’t even want to see. If I fell asleep during the show, I went to see it again — something MoviePass no longer allows.

Based on the 54 movies, MoviePass recorded revenue of $1.66 per film for each $12 it handed over to the movie theater.

How could MoviePass possibly make money on a deal like that? By hoping, I guess, that other people who paid their fee would forget to go to movies. (Or maybe by selling my moviegoing data to other firms — something that has become a no-no since Facebook got excoriated for doing it. )

Well, apparently there weren’t many customers who paid and then didn’t show up for films.

There are still four months left on my MoviePass membership, so my per-film revenue is likely to head lower. I’m shooting for a buck a movie.

MoviePass recently had some “technical” problems with its app before it “solved” them by borrowing $5 million. To fix its, ahem, cash flow problem, it recently announced that subscribers won’t be able to see the hottest, just-released movies and raised its monthly price by $5.

My moviegoing experiment will probably have to slow down with MoviePass’ new rules. But I’m still ahead $558 on that initial investment of $89.95.

I’ve told this story before, but I will do it again since Apple is striving this week to become the first company in history worth $1 trillion.

Back in the late 1970s, I was a writer and editor on a prestigious electronics industry publication. I wrote a lot about hot new gadgets — video games, solar-powered watches and CB radios. Then along came something we called the home computer.

That’s how I met Steve Jobs, the late founder of Apple. The company consisted of Jobs, his partner, Steve

Wozniak, and not much else. Jobs was a nice guy but a pain when it came to his computer, which he always had with him. I never met Wozniak, but Jobs was always present at consumer electronics shows in Las Vegas and Chicago, where he’d badger people about how this machine of his was going to change the world.

I believed computers would catch on in homes once the price came down. But I thought that an already-established company like IBM, General Electric, Xerox, Microsoft or even a video-game maker like Coleco or Atari would be the first to pioneer this new market successfully.

But it was Apple, with Jobs’ vision, that did it best. Jobs died in 2011, but his company is healthier than ever and heading toward a landmark valuation.

Congratulations, Apple. Jobs’ vision changed the world. On Friday, we’ll see if President

Trump can go two-for-two on the economy in the past two weeks.

Last week, the government announced the US economy grew at an impressive 4.1 percent annualized rate in the second quarter of 2018. This week, we’ll know how many new jobs were generated in July.

Wall Street is guessingg 190,000 positions were created in July. That compares with 213,000 in June and an impressive 244,000 in May.

The unemployment rate is expected to dip back down to 3.9 percent from 4 percent in June. Because of the way that figure is calculated, a decline in the jobless rate could be caused either by more people finding work or by fewer people actively looking for jobs.

If you aren’t looking for work, the Bureau of Labor Statistics doesn’t consider you unemployed.

If the experts’ guesses are correct, it could propel interest rates on the 10year bond beyond the much-watched 3 percent level.

The Federal Reserve met this week and decided not to change the rates that it controls. But that doesn’t mean the financial markets can’t, and won’t, raise rates on their own. And that’s precisely what has been happening.

Right now, it looks as though the markets are telling the Fed where rates ought to be. And the 10-year note staying over the 3 percent rate — a level that before June hadn’t been surpassed since 2014 — could have major implications for all markets. Interest rates mostly climb because of inflation at any given moment as well as anticipated inflation in the future. But a lack of confidence in those running a government can also prompt investors to pull their money out of a country, causing the cost of money — which is what interest rates are — to go up and the value of a currency to decline.

That lack of confidence is what the Trump administration must avoid if it is to turn the little bit of economic prosperity into a longer winning streak.