Are You Really Going to Use Shiba Inu Coin at AMC?

It’s just a matter of time before you’ll be able to use that Shiba Inu (CRYPTO:SHIB) that’s burning a hole in your digital pocket to pay for a matinee movie ticket or a box of Swedish Fish at your local AMC Entertainment Holdings (NYSE:AMC) multiplex. AMC CEO Adam Aron is asking his social media followers if they want the country’s leading movie theater chain to accept the rapidly ascending cryptocurrency as a way to settle up transactions. 

No one should be surprised at this point. Aron has never met a meme he didn’t like. On the company’s August earnings call, he discussed a potential partnership with GameStop — the only other stock with the same kind of speculative fandom as AMC. Shortly after announcing this summer that AMC was working to accept four different tokens, he added Dogecoin (CRYPTO:DOGE) to the mix when that one was all the rage. Now that Shiba Inu is all the rage — and has soared by 875% over the past month — of course Aron is going to try to latch on to the trending digital currency.

Token of appreciation 

I’m not saying that I can anticipate Aron’s every move, but it was pretty easy to connect the dots when Shiba Inu was soaring, temporarily replacing Dogecoin as the market’s meme crypto of choice. I wrote on Wednesday that it was just a matter of time before AMC would hop on the Shiba Inu bandwagon. Less than two days later, Aron broke out this new Twitter poll. 

TWITTER POLL #2: As you know, you can now purchase AMC gift cards using cryptocurrency, and our IT group is writing code so that soon we can accept online payments in Bitcoin, Ethereum, Litecoin and Dogecoin among others. Should we strive to take Shiba Inu too?

— Adam Aron (@CEOAdam) October 29, 2021

By the time an exec like Aron starts breaking out the polls, the decision is as good as made. Obviously, “yes” is going to emerge victorious. The fandom for any cryptocurrency is always going to be louder than the naysayer camp. This poll still has another two days to go, but so far, more than 87% of those responding want AMC to accept Shiba Inu. So by the end of this week, Aron will predictably be back at the meme fishing hole, saying that Shiba Inu fans have spoken, and that AMC will now have to figure out a way to make it happen before the end of the year. 

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Aron’s a smart guy. He ran a few major companies before sliding into the corner office at AMC, and he knows the power of having customers on your side. Now, he’s teaching a master class for other CEOs who wind up at the helm of meme stocks on how to turn retail investors into passionate brand ambassadors. 

He probably also knows that most of the people voting in the poll will never convert their cryptocurrency into movie tickets and popcorn tubs. Even if AMC shoulders the transaction costs for crypto conversions, spending those tokens casually is not going to be a popular choice. By and large, people don’t buy Shiba Inu or any other cryptocurrencies because they want to use them to make smooth digital transactions — people buy them because they feel the cryptocurrencies will appreciate in value. 

Any transaction involving crypto is also legally a taxable event. How many people do you think will want to do an additional tax-time calculation of the cost basis of their initial crypto purchase to determine whether a transaction creates a taxable gain or loss, just to satisfy their urge for a box of Milk Duds? Most people probably won’t bother reporting those small transactions, but if you don’t realize that the IRS is beefing up its ability to enforce the tax laws regarding crypto gains, one day, you could be in for a rude awakening.

The folks participating in Aron’s poll aren’t really interested in swapping out their Shiba Inu for a pair of tickets to see Eternals later this month. They just think that the headlines that will spread when AMC embraces the token will give a brief boost to its value.

In addition, most of the folks who have voted in the poll so far probably won’t even be Shiba Inu holders by the time AMC starts accepting crypto. The country’s leading crypto trading platform reports that the average holding time for Shiba Inu investors is just 10 days. Aron knows what he’s doing. Shiba Inu speculators know what they’re doing. It’s all just show business.

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