It had been a point of personal satisfaction for me, that in my day I was the best damn popcorn-slinger in any movie house in New England.

The secret was in the butter.   A squirt of butter in the middle, then another squirt on top.  I know it doesn’t seem like a big deal.  But even something that simple seems revolutionary if nobody before you thought to do it.   We’d all been doing it the way we’d been trained to – fill the bucket; a squirt of butter on the top; and you’re done.  And then about half an hour into the main feature, you’d have folks coming out to get more butter for the bottom half of their corn.  That’s what first gave me the idea.

Most people never even noticed what I was doing.   But those that did, they always appreciated it.   I’d hear them saying, “Now there’s a boy who knows his popcorn”, or something like that.   It’s that extra touch, above and beyond the call of duty, that makes for good customer service.   That’s the kind of thing we went for back in the day.

Pretty soon my co-workers at the concession stands started following my lead, which was okay because everybody knew I’d been the first to think of it.  I could take pride in the fact that I was the setter of this particular trend.   And customers still lined up to get their popcorn from me most of the time, and when they couldn’t they’d ask whoever was serving them, “could you do it halfway, put a squirt of butter on, and then another squirt on the top?”  One time someone asked me that, which upset me because he obviously didn’t realize that I’d come up with that in the first place.

So one day I was squirting the first squirt of butter and this customer started yelling at me.

“What are you doing, that’s barely half-full!” he shouted. “I paid for a full tub of popcorn and I want a full tub of popcorn!”