The Receiver Archives - Page 2 of 3

The Grade from the Opening-Night Audience

On the Friday a film opens, CinemaScore staff in five randomly chosen cities hand moviegoers a small card. Each viewer gives the film a letter grade. The average, from A+ to F, goes to the studios that night. As of February 2026, 23 films had received an F.

Ed Mintz started the service after he saw The Cheap Detective in June 1978. He had read a positive review of the film. He disliked it. He then heard another moviegoer say he wanted “the opinions of ordinary people, not critics.” Polling began in 1979.

In 2013 the reviews for Man of Steel were “crummy, rating just 56 percent fresh on Rotten Tomatoes.” Its opening-night audiences gave it an A-.

Problems per 100 Vehicles

Since 1987, J.D. Power has asked people who bought or leased a new car what went wrong in the first 90 days. Its Initial Quality Study ranks brands and models by problems per 100 vehicles. The first study put the Toyota Cressida on top, with 69 problems per hundred cars. A company history says the surveys “defined quality in terms of how consumers judged it.”

In 2014 problems rose. A J.D. Power vice president explained that some owners said “the technology is hard to understand, difficult to use, or simply does not always work as designed.”

The plant awards are the exception. They are “based solely on defects and malfunctions and exclude design-related problems.”

Fitness for Use

Joseph M. Juran’s Quality Control Handbook first appeared in 1951. It has gone through many editions. The National Academy of Engineering says it “is still considered the definitive compilation on quality.” Juran’s short definition was: “Quality is fitness for use.”

A later edition, Juran’s Quality Handbook, gave a longer definition: “Quality means those features of products which meet customer needs and thereby provide customer satisfaction.” A second definition named “freedom from deficiencies.” These are errors that require rework or “that result in field failures, customer dissatisfaction, customer claims and so on.”

What the Customer Says

In Total Quality Control, Armand Feigenbaum defined quality as “a customer determination based on the customer’s experience with the product or service.” The customer’s requirements may be “stated or unstated, conscious or merely sensed, technically operational or entirely subjective.”

In 2005 IndustryWeek reported a shorter version, based on his presentation at its Best Plants Conference: “Quality is what the customer says is quality.”

The Portrait of a Daughter

A father ordered an enlarged portrait of his dead daughter, painted from a small picture. He testified that if the portrait “was not perfectly satisfactory to me in every particular, I need not take it or pay for it.” He refused the finished work and would not look at a revised version until the trial. The artist sued.

In 1878 the Michigan Supreme Court ruled for the father in Gibson v. Cranage. “It may be that the picture was an excellent one and that the defendant ought to have been satisfied with it …,” the court wrote. “Artists or third parties might consider a portrait an excellent one, and yet it prove very unsatisfactory …” Under the agreement the father “was the only person who had the right to decide this question.”

Courts keep this personal test for matters of taste, such as a portrait. Where a satisfaction clause concerns “commercial quality, operative fitness, or mechanical utility,” they generally presume that the parties meant what a reasonable person would accept.

The Crust Tasted Like Cardboard

In an advertising campaign around the end of 2009, Domino’s featured its customers’ complaints. One said the crust tasted like cardboard. The company publicly admitted past mistakes and introduced a new recipe, with a garlic-seasoned crust and a blend of mozzarella and provolone.

The company asked customers to try again. Patrick Doyle, who became CEO as the campaign began, knew the risk. “If people tried (the pizza) again and they had a bad experience, we’d be done.”

Live from the Dress Rehearsal

Every week, Saturday Night Live performs its whole show twice. At 8 p.m. the cast plays a dress rehearsal for one live audience. At 11:30 p.m. the show goes on air in front of another.

In one writer’s account, about 45 sketches are read on Wednesday. Eleven to 13 are performed at the dress rehearsal, and two or three of those are cut before air. An SNL editor explained: “Our sketches will live or die by the reaction of the audience.”

The Ending Test Audiences Rejected

In the original ending of Fatal Attraction (1987), Glenn Close’s character kills herself, and Michael Douglas’s character is arrested for her murder. Test audiences did not like that she escaped punishment. Director Adrian Lyne reshot the ending.

Close said later: “Six months after we finished shooting, I got a call that we had to reshoot the ending.” She fought it for weeks. The new ending became a hit, and the film was one of the highest-grossing films of 1987. Lyne has said the change “was an emotional and dramatic choice, not a financial one.”

The star rating

American commerce runs on aggregated customer ratings, displayed next to the price on every listing. Quality is expressed as an average of opinions, alongside the number that would buy it.

Usability testing

American product development runs sessions in which ordinary users attempt tasks while being observed, and the failures are recorded as defects in the product rather than in the user. The method locates the fault in the design by default.