In February, Alamo Drafthouse—the theater chain known for its food and drink service, retro branding, and diverse film programming—started rolling out a major operational change. The brand phased out its on-paper food and drink ordering system for a QR code system that requires viewers to order from their phones. The move was designed to solve a host of operational problems for the brand’s employees and guests.

Then, the uproar began.

“This hurt more than, like, most of the breakups I’ve had,” Andy Young, a film and TV editor in Los Angeles, told The New York Times. The actor Elijah Wood tweeted that the new experience was “truly awful.” The Alamo Drafthouse subreddit exploded with backlash. Employees at one location in Denver held a strike to protest disruptions to their work. A Change.org petition, which now has over 10,000 signatures, emerged to call for a reversal of the new policy.

The vocal response was almost entirely negative—and it largely stems from the fact that the Alamo has long established itself as a distraction-free movie viewing space with its “Don’t Talk” marketing campaign. To many loyal fans, the Alamo was one of the last bastions of the phoneless world, and this new mobile ordering system represented the downfall of that ethos for a corporate check. 

Alamo Drafthouse’s executive leadership sees things differently. Multiple sources told Fast Company that, in many ways, Alamo’s previous operational design was broken—causing more interruptions for guests and more work for employees behind the scenes. The results of the new mobile ordering system, they say, simply don’t match up with the backlash: Alamo is having its best year for box office revenue since 2019, employees are netting higher take-home pay on average, and guests are placing more in-theater orders than ever before. 

“Alamo Drafthouse has always been focused on delivering the best moviegoing experience possible,” CEO Michael Kustermann says. “Technology has evolved, and we want to embrace the ability to evolve with it if it improves the cinematic experience. We believe it does.”

What’s happened

Alamo Drafthouse began in 1997 in Austin as the brainchild of Tim and Karrie League, a husband and wife team. The initial location showed specialty programming not available at other theaters, hosted themed events, reunion screenings, and director retrospectives, and served a limited in-house menu. Since then, Alamo has grown into an enterprise with around 40 locations nationwide, and it was acquired by Sony Pictures Entertainment in 2024 for an estimated $200 million.

Today, the brand programs more films than any other circuit every year, still hosts events, and serves food and drinks (though now with a much more expansive menu). And, until recently, Alamo relied on a purely analog system to take customers’ orders. Viewers would look at physical menus placed at their seats, write their orders on a slip of paper, and use a call button to let employees know that their order was ready to be collected. At the end of the night, receipts were doled out by waiters and payment was collected from the aisles. 

Behind the scenes, though, Alamo had been working on a new mobile ordering system for years—one that uses a scannable QR code menu and digital ordering interface rather than pens, papers, and call buttons. The new system officially rolled out in February, and is now the standard across the company’s locations.

Why Alamo Drafthouse is in hot water with fans

It’s not difficult to see why Alamo’s new mobile ordering policy has ruffled so many feathers, considering how staunch the brand has been about preventing viewers from using their phones in the past. 

From its second month of operation to the present, the chain has invested in hundreds of “Don’t Talk” public service announcements (PSAs) informing viewers of its no talking or texting policy, assuring them that violators would be permanently banned from theaters. The people delivering the message varied—from Jamie Lee Curtis to Ryan Coogler—but the takeaway remained the same: Do not, under any circumstances, take your phone out during a movie. 

To be clear, phones were never actually banned in Alamo locations—in fact, it’s been standard protocol at many locations for years for guests to show waiters their digital tickets from their seats. Still, Alamo’s decades-long “Don’t Talk” campaign has undoubtedly caused guests to view Alamo theaters as phone-free spaces—and, for many fans, that meant that the new ordering system felt like a betrayal. 

One statement on the matter from the Austin Film Critics Association reads, “‘Don’t talk. Don’t text’ has been the Drafthouse’s mission statement since its earliest days as a single-screen cinema in Austin. Its growth into a national cinematic institution has been in no small part due to audiences knowing they can have a disturbance-free experience, and that staff will intervene to prevent the distraction of cellphone usage.” 

That sentiment is echoed by dozens of posts on the Alamo subreddit, many of which express a belief that the change reflects a broader loss of Alamo’s identity after its Sony acquisition. Under a post titled “Never coming back,” one commenter wrote, “Any business that’s remotely good in this capitalist hellscape will inevitably be bought up and ruined by one of 5 insatiable conglomerates (sorry ‘investment firms’ via the conglomerates they control) or else gradually succumb to enshittification on its own due to the endless compounding factors that are killing third spaces.”

In online discussion forums, horror stories about the rollout of the mobile ordering system abound. Alamo has said that it’s listening to feedback and working on some minor updates to the interface, like fixing bugs, updating the text message reminding guests to close their tab, increasing font size, and reordering the navigation. 

Broadly, though, sources at the company tell Fast Company that the online backlash against the new policy stands in stark contrast to in-theater results. 

Why Alamo scrapped pen and paper

As Alamo’s new mobile ordering system has rolled out, it seems as if the old pen-and-paper ordering system is being viewed through rose-colored glasses—when, in fact, that system came with its own host of problems. According to an Alamo spokesperson, the company has received complaints from fans for years about the design of its food delivery system.

To start, analog ordering meant that, any time a viewer pressed their call button for refills, silverware, napkins, or a dessert course, an employee would need to return to the theater and walk through the aisles in front of other guests to collect their paper. In order to apply add-ons like season pass discounts or loyalty rewards, guests would need to talk directly to a concierge or waiter. Then, during the third act of the film, employees had to print out and organize physical receipts for every seat and complete each transaction face-to-face—a process that often landed during the movie’s climax. 

“We’ve always innovated as much as we could around the paper, pen, and server model,” the spokesperson told Fast Company. “Our teams had to invent really complex and very manual order management systems—literally sorting paper—to balance their own capacity. They’d also have to do a last call check-in three-quarters of the way through the movie, and then a check drop often close to the climax—two distractions that guests didn’t love. Technology has enabled us to substantially improve the system to limit disruptions and increase operational efficiencies.” 

The new mobile ordering system is built to reduce the number of times that employees need to walk in front of guests during films as well as eliminate time-consuming receipt-printing processes behind the scenes. Now, employees are able to see all orders digitally and drop off refills and silverware in one stop, rather than making repeated runs through the theater to collect paper orders and again to deliver the items. Eventually, the spokesperson adds, guests will also be able to save favorite orders, order ahead, and schedule items throughout the film to better pace their experience. 

While some fans have raised concerns about how this new system might impact employees (especially after Sony’s 2024 acquisition led to a wave of layoffs), Alamo says that it hasn’t laid off any employees due to the QR rollout, and hourly workers are retaining their base wages. In fact, the spokesperson says that the system has allowed employees to manage high volumes of attendees more efficiently, contributing to higher average hourly take-home pay for the majority of workers.

And, despite the online backlash, mobile ordering doesn’t seem to have dented Alamo’s business results. Subscribers to Alamo’s season pass have jumped, and food and beverage orders are up since the new system rolled out. The spokesperson says any claims about guests constantly pulling out their phones during films are hyperbolic. The company’s data shows that 85% of orders are placed before the movie, and only 15% come during the run time.

Kustermann stresses that, ultimately, food and drink ordering is only one small part of Alamo’s business. He’s focused on maintaining the brand’s other core pillars—like its diverse film line-up, custom ad-free preshow, screening events, and annual festival—and, for those reasons, he says, “We need Alamo Drafthouse to be strong in an industry filled with volatility.”

It’s clear that mobile ordering has taken a toll on some fans’ perception of Alamo’s brand—but, ultimately, it might just be the right choice for the brand operationally.

“We believe it’s worth it because it makes our business model more sustainable, puts more money in the pockets of our hardworking hourly venue team members, and can create less distraction for our guests,” Kustermann says.

When Olympic skier Eileen Gu walked the steps of the Metropolitan Museum of Art at the Met Gala on May 4, she wore a short, shimmering gown that appeared to be made of thousands of iridescent soap bubbles caught mid-float, clustered across her body and trailing into the air behind her.

It was created by Iris van Herpen in collaboration with the Tokyo-London design studio A.A.Murakami. Assembled from 15,000 hand-formed glass bubbles, it took 2,550 hours to construct, and contained hidden microprocessors that released real bubbles into the air as Gu moved.

It was also a glimpse into the show that opens at the Brooklyn Museum on May 16: Iris van Herpen: Sculpting the Senses, the North American debut of a retrospective that has already traveled from Paris to Brisbane, Australia, then Singapore and the Netherlands.

The 2016 original of that bubble dress will be in the show. “It represents the air that’s inside of our bodies,” says Matthew Yokobosky, the Brooklyn Museum’s senior curator of fashion and material culture. “Over 90% of our bodies are made up of air.”

Over two decades, van Herpen has built a body of work that treats science as a creative collaborator. She has made couture inspired by the air in our lungs, the architecture of a stingray’s skeleton, the magnetic fields of the Large Hadron Collider. She has worked with architects, paleontologists, and biologists, and used everything from iron filings to magnets to bioluminescent algae as raw materials. In doing so, she has quietly redefined what it means for fashion to be art.

The Brooklyn Museum has been making that argument for nearly a century. Its 1934 Story of Silk exhibition is often cited as the beginning of fashion’s museum era; it has since staged retrospectives of work by Madame Grès, Schiaparelli, Jean Paul Gaultier, Pierre Cardin, Christian Dior, Virgil Abloh, and Thierry Mugler. Sculpting the Senses extends the lineage.

Water in all its forms

The bubble dress is a launchpad for the exhibit. “The show starts about different inspirations from the different forms of water, liquid, frozen, gaseous, and how all those different states have been equally informative for her as a design inspiration,” Yokobosky explains.

It is paired with a piece by the Japanese art collective Mé, a work that Yokobosky says “looks as if they had taken a slice of the ocean and put it into the gallery.”

Van Herpen, who grew up in the Dutch village of Wamel, has returned again and again to water in all its states. That preoccupation goes back to the work that put her on the map. Her 2010 Crystallization collection, built around limestone deposits, ice crystals, and the choreography of a splash, contained the first 3D-printed garment ever shown on a fashion runway.

The skeletal, ivory-colored top made in collaboration with British architect Daniel Widrig, is on display in Brooklyn. Depending on the angle, the piece looks like a fossilized vertebra or a Dutch ruff from the 17th century. Materialise, the Belgian 3D-printing firm that helped fabricate it, had until then been making architectural models.

Bones, fossils, and a baby dinosaur

Since the natural history specimens in the Paris version of van Herpen’s show couldn’t travel, Yokobosky struck up a new partnership with the American Museum of Natural History. The Brooklyn show now includes an 80-million-year-old ichthyosaur skeleton and a baby dinosaur, displayed in dialogue with van Herpen’s bone-inspired couture. A gown built around the architecture of bird skeletons sits near the dinosaur fossils—a nod to the fact that birds are the closest living relatives of dinosaurs.

“When you look at Iris’s gown, you don’t necessarily see bones immediately, but as you look more closely, you realize that there are all those articulations of bone,” Yokobosky says.

Biomimicry runs deep in van Herpen’s work. Her atelier doesn’t replicate a fish scale; it studies how a fish scale is structured, then translates that structure into a new material. Lucid (2016) borrowed from the orb webs of argiope spiders. Sympoiesis and Sensory Seas took their cues from coral systems.

The designer’s work has a sustainability dimension too. Van Herpen has experimented with garments made from recycled plastic ocean waste, 3D-printed cocoa beans, and, last year, created a “living” dress in collaboration with biodesigner Chris Bellamy that was seeded with 125 million bioluminescent algae.

In an industry that produces somewhere between 92 million and 100 million tons of textile waste every year, the gesture suggests that garments don’t have to come from petrochemicals. They can come from a lab, or a forest, or—occasionally—a tide pool.

The slowest fashion

The most quietly radical section of the show may be the one with no garment at all. For the Brooklyn exhibit, van Herpen created a new video installation that takes the small, often invisible gestures of her atelier—the placement of a hand, the catch of a needle, the slow accumulation of a single embroidered surface—and projects them, unedited and in real time, onto 25-foot-high screens inside the museum’s 70-foot rotunda.

“She really wanted people to understand the slow process that goes into making couture . . . what emerges from this long, meditative process,” Yokobosky says.

Fashion in 2026 is dominated by AI-generated lookbooks, Shein-style ultrafast cycles, and the increasingly seamless integration of agentic commerce into the shopping experience. In contrast, van Herpen does not even do ready-to-wear; she focuses entirely on couture. She still makes everything by hand, in collaboration with a rotating cast of scientists and artists, and she still sells the pieces. She just doesn’t make very many of them.

“She is very devoted to the craft of couture and to experimenting and helping us understand what is possible in the future of fashion,” Yokobosky says.

The Brooklyn show closes in a space the museum is calling Cosmic Bloom: a darkened room full of mannequins suspended from the ceiling at strange angles, wearing some of van Herpen’s most surreal and saturated gowns. It is also a clear statement of what the entire exhibition is arguing—that the body, in van Herpen’s hands, isn’t a hanger for product. It is a small piece of the universe, and clothing is one of the languages we use to describe it.

Sculpting the Senses runs through December 6.

McDonald’s spent decades training customers that if you had a dollar, you could get a burger. Now it’s trying to redefine what “value” means, and it turns out customers have a very different idea. More important, those customers aren’t about to pay $2.50 for something they think should cost a lot less without complaining about it.

It’s less a story about burgers and more a story about trust. Specifically, it’s a story about the promise McDonald’s has made its customers for decades. It’s also about the trust problem the company created entirely on its own when its customers decided it was no longer keeping that promise.

The actual story here is that McDonald’s rolled out its new McValue menu, featuring items that are all “under $3 each.” It’s built around what the company calls “predictable everyday low prices.” There are no more complicated app-only promotions, no more buy-one-get-one deals, no more dollar menu nostalgia. Instead, you get prices that are, depending on how you do the math, roughly two and a half times what customers remember paying not that long ago.

The backlash has been immediate and, honestly, a little brutal. There are Reddit threads full of people reminiscing about 99¢ McDoubles. Customers are publicly mourning the death of the “buy one, get one for $1” deals that used to anchor their lunch routine. The general sense is that McDonald’s has lost touch with what its customers actually perceive as a value.

Here’s the thing: None of this is actually about the $2.50 cost of a McDouble.

McDonald’s built its entire competitive position on one very specific idea—that value and convenience are more important than anything else. If you were hungry, McDonald’s was fast, and the price was low enough that evaluating your options felt like a waste of time.

Which is why a $2.50 McDouble isn’t being evaluated against inflation-adjusted commodity prices or franchisee labor costs. It’s being evaluated against what McDonald’s itself promised for 30 years. The company ran dollar menus and two-for-one campaigns long enough to wire a specific expectation into an entire generation of customers. Unwiring that expectation requires a lot more than a press release about a “value platform.”

The timing makes it worse. Airline fees, streaming price hikes, hotel “resort fees” at places with no resort—Americans have spent the past few years watching every affordable convenience slowly get more expensive and less generous. Fast food was one of the last categories that still felt like a safe, cheap, low-stakes decision. That feeling is gone now, and McDonald’s is the most visible symbol of its disappearance.

There’s also a threshold problem the company may be underestimating. Once fast-food prices climb close enough to fast-casual prices, customers start asking the one question McDonald’s has never wanted them to ask: Is this actually good? For most of the restaurant’s history, that question never came up because the price made it irrelevant. When you’re spending closer to $10 once you add fries and a drink, you start comparing the experience against options that might be slightly more expensive but noticeably better.

McDonald’s never needed to win that comparison in the past. It just depended on customers not thinking about it at all.

To be clear: The economics here aren’t crazy. Wages are up. Ingredients cost more. Franchises are businesses, not charities. Selling burgers for a dollar wasn’t going to last forever.

But what companies can’t control is how customers emotionally process the moment the change arrives. McDonald’s didn’t just raise prices—it disrupted the unconscious habit that made it indispensable. And once people start treating a fast-food run as a calculated purchase instead of an automatic one, McDonald’s puts itself in a completely different business than the one it built its brand on. That’s something no company should ever do.

—Jason Aten

This article originally appeared on Fast Company’s sister website, Inc.com. 

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