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Comment by voisin | Hacker News Reader

It’s bizarre that consumers collectively agree to these terms. If I started a business that was this anti-customer, I would assume there would be zero customers willing to take that deal.

Moreover, why hasn’t anyone introduced a brand that doesn’t have all these awful features?

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> Moreover, why hasn’t anyone introduced a brand that doesn’t have all these awful features?

Why would they when our national paper of record adopts similar tactics?

https://social.kernel.org/notice/AWSTn6aOpeEvSKZ7Wy

Years ago I called NYT to cancel my subscription. After I repeated for the third or fourth time "I just want to cancel please" the representative finally relented but not before insulting me based on some assumption he formed based on my name.

I think a significant number of people at least enter into the agreement thinking it's a feature. Roughly:

  - Going to the gym sucks, and I don't want to go
  - I should force myself to go to the gym anyway
  - Gyms are expensive, and hard to cancel
  - The pain and shame of canceling, combined with ongoing cost, will be a motivator for me to actually go to the gym

In short, I think a lot of people erroneously believe that locking themselves into the contract will motivate them. Instead, they end up still not going and also paying because of the contract.

I don't think I've heard of anyone thinking gyms being hard to cancel being a good thing

I agree with rebeccaskinner: People think that way in their heart of hearts, but it's a bit shamey to admit that they see themselves as so weak, so nobody adnmits it openly.

(But, hey, as the old Swedish saying goes: "Efter sig själv dömer man andra" -- ~"Your judgement of others is based on using yourself as a measure", so whatever you ascribe to others is a reflection of yourself. Freud may have invented the label "Projection", but Swedish folk wisdom had him beat to the concept by Idunno how many centuries.)

I think that most people simply don't read contracts before signing them. They go by what the sales pitch says, and sales pitches are almost never honest and complete.

> why hasn’t anyone introduced a brand that doesn’t have all these awful features?

There are, at least in my part of the country, a lot of gyms that don't behave this way -- but you have to actually read the contract to know if that's the sort of gym you're in.

Usually what I understood from people was - they just didn’t read the contract.

Contract was for a year and then after a year you can cancel each month or at the end of a year period.

But people want to quit after 3 months or 6 months and then they post on socials how they got scammed.

In my life I had now 3 or 4 contracts and I trained usually like 3 or 4 years at each. Never had any issues canceling, just go to front desk make last payment, cancel use last month and done.

There are a few gyms that let you cancel online. If you know of any other chains that require certified mail/hard to cancel requirements let me know. I recently had to add a signature feature to my app for Retro Fitness!

# Require certified mail (100% sure on these)

- LA Fitness

- Planet Fitness

- Gold's Gym

- Retro Fitness

# Let you cancel online / do not require in person or certified mail (From memory based on my research)

- Orange Theory Fitness

- Blink Fitness

- Equinox

- 24 hour fitness

(edit: formatting, clarification)

Orange theory requires in person (at least my franchise does.)

Huh. Their website says you can send them an email.

I guess it could take a lot of legwork to figure out what individual franchises allow.

https://memberservices20.zendesk.com/hc/en-us/articles/36004...

I think it's because the scammy techniques allow lower apparent princes. People who shop by price will end up at the scammy gym. Maybe people are sensitive to price when it comes to gyms, and/or the true cost of a gym membership is too high for almost anyone.

People who don't want to admit the cost is too high are perfect targets because they also don't want to admit they will want to cancel in the future. I, uh, am talking about a friend of mine, of course.

Popularity is an anti feature at the gym. Working adults have limited windows to workout and so once a gym gets affordable like 24hr fitness where seasonal sales at Costco make it VERY cheap it becomes a gym you might not actually want to work out in.

Then you have the whole gym owner archetype which I won’t dive into but IMO exasperates the issue.

Mega-gyms are pretty terrible. I've never been to a 24 Hour Fitness, LA Fitness, or Gold's Gym that wasn't a sea of equipment hoggers, broken machines, random dirty towels, occupied lockers, and screens with CNN or daytime TV on. What's even more strange is how willing people are to pay hundreds or thousands of dollars for an Equinox membership. The rationale is that paying that much upfront keeps you motivated to make your payment worthwhile, but both people I know who've made this mistake ended up going only a few times before giving up.

Smaller neighorhood gyms are so much better, let you cancel any time, and don't make you talk to a sales-bro when signing up.

I assume part of the attraction of an equinox is that everyone else there is paying hundreds of dollars per month for a gym membership

Yeah, that's probably the unsaid motivation. I just haven't seen it actually turn out that way with the small sample size I've people I've known who signed up for Equinox.

The other thing about Equinox, and expensive gyms in general, is that a gym's price and amount of equipment doesn't closely correlate with fitness success. You can't outrun a poor diet, genetics explains the vast majority of a person's physique even if they get their body fat down to <13%, and only maybe 6 different exercises will work out all the major muscle groups. Setting aside the dirtiness or crowdedness of certain gyms, every extra dollar you spend at the gym is a diminishing return. As a regular guy, I simply can't justify paying that much for Equinox no matter how hot and motivated those gym goers will be because I already have the motivation to work out twice a weak at a cheap ass (yet clean and uncrowded) gym that's closer to me anyway.

I used the equinox next door to the office for a while because it was next door to the office (and membership was subsidized). It seemed that the customer base was fit people between 30 and 45. Being outside that demographic meant I didn’t have to interact with the other customers, which to me was a feature.

> I've never been to a 24 Hour Fitness, LA Fitness, or Gold's Gym that wasn't a sea of equipment hoggers, broken machines, random dirty towels, occupied lockers, and screens with CNN or daytime TV on.

I was a member of Gold’s Gym in Japan for more than a decade and worked out at many different branches, and other than occasional equipment hoggers none of that applied. The gyms were all clean and well maintained. I also used a Gold’s Gym for a while in Southern California, and it was fine, too. When it came time for me to cancel my memberships, there was no hassle whatsoever.

Another mega gym I used a few times in Southern California was pretty awful, though. I still remember the dirt under all of the machines and the caked dried sweat covering the handles of the ellipticals.

TBH - Anything Japanese doesn't count.

They have a sense of Quality that almost no other demographic does.

> Another mega gym I used a few times in Southern California was pretty awful, though. I still remember the dirt under all of the machines and the caked dried sweat covering the handles of the ellipticals.

That must be the 24 Hour Fitness on Ocean Park Blvd in Santa Monica.

Probably because gym density isn't super high in some areas, so consumers may not have a ton of choices. And opening a gym that can compete with a big gym chain is not as easy as opening a sandwich shop to compete with subway.

Because vanishingly few people want to pay the true per-visit costs of a gym. Most of them would rather be lured in by a low price and be subsidized by the 'suckers' locked into paying for a year.

This works for for people who live somewhere and go to the gym constantly. But God forbid you travel. I live in Europe, and in my town gym does not work in the way described in article. But when I went to the USA for two months, I had to sign a yearly contract with a trial and cancel it before the end of the trial.

Because you are ready to purchase and presumably make your life better? It's not like you're going to read the contract, see that the only way out is to send a certified letter or cancel in person, and think, "Nah, I'm going to take my business down the street."

Just like any ToS, if you want to use it you don't have much of a choice

> It’s bizarre that consumers collectively agree to these terms.

Sorry to blunt, but if you think that's bizarre...I don't think you understand human behavior very well.

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