i tried to update my credit card so they won’t send me daily fucking emails that i “owe” them $30 (because a gym membership definitely needs to be a cOnTraCt, sure, sure), but the website didn’t work, so I tried calling their “automated” system, whereupon after entering my info to the robot, it gave up and connected me to a guy who i had to speak do and do it all over again.
then they made the poor guy literally ask at the end ‘are you satisfied with my service today’
Why are all gym memberships like this? The first thing I check before starting a service is how easy it is to end it. I’ve not been able to find a single gym with reasonable terms.
This is something that needs to be regulated somehow.
In the meantime, one could always pay with a prepaid card and then just never add funds when you decide to quit. Then just “return to sender” any mail they try to send you.
its a purposeful way of extracting money from a group they know wont fully utilize what they are selling.
they want you to sign up, and forget about it. its a scam.
Yeah, that’s why I’m alright sticking to the exercise I can access for free: walking, cycling, longboarding, calisthenics…
I feel like I’m in better shape now than I was when I had an actual gym membership
You’ve also described why I tend to avoid a lot of subscription based services.
yep, eeeeveryone is moving to this model for that captured audience.
roller skating mahn, thats where its at!
My husband is a roller skater! I always think people think we’re an odd couple, with my board and his skates on the trails
harness him up and make him your longboard puller! screw what people think, most people suck.
Its not a “scam” by definition because you are getting what you pay for. But yeah its predatory as fuck.
Given that many tell you how easy it is to cancel when it’s not, those are scams.
I do the same. So many gyms have abusive terms which is an immediate deal breaker for me.
There are handful I’ve found that aren’t bad offering true month-to-month service. Give notice by phone or email by X day of the month and your membership ends at the end of that month. Miss that date? You only have one more month beyond that then.
For years Planet Fitness had a good deal they’d only run for a couple of days a year where you could prepay for the entire year for $99 (or later $120). You didn’t give them your bank info, no “credit card on file”. You could literally hand them the cash and 365 days from that day your membership would expire with zero action on our part. That was the best membership deal I’ve seen yet. I don’t know if they still do that.
If you’re using your real name I would imagine they’d send the debt to collections which would cost you even more when your credit score tanks and you try to buy a car or house.
I think the YMCA still might have good terms, but I haven’t checked. That’s where we used to go.
Probably important for people to know, but I doubt it would be terribly impactful, and I’m so done playing their games. There’s always something that hurts my credit score anyway, so I just assume I’ve already lost this battle before it began.
I had a gym want me to sign a contract that they could take photos of me and use my likeness for promotional material or whatever else. They can fuck off with that. The manager actually came in and tried to tell me nobody was going to use photos of me. Okay, then take it out of the contract.
This was on top of the usual, “to cancel, you must send Certified mail via eagle to Mordor with exactly seven stamps all from different sets in a black envelope on yellow paper with the date that we read the contents written in green ink on the outside.”