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Comment by mikestew | Hacker News Reader

If I am advised to open a separate financial account just to safely do business with a vendor, maybe I simply shouldn’t do business with that vendor?

But why all this scamminess to begin with? Are there that many customers that are somehow bad actors? If so, why not just turn off the card key, and done: no more gym access? Simple greed? Or the only way to keep the membership to $X/month is to make it hard to cancel, otherwise it would be $X+y/month and no one would join?

IOW, there’s some dynamic I must be missing. Maybe it is simply greed. But gyms have employed dark patterns for decades (I’m old, and it has always been this way), what has kept someone from opening the “not scammy” gym?

(And if you live near Redmond, WA: someone has opened that gym, called Eastside Gym.)

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It’s scammy because the gym business can very difficult unless you have people paying and not coming in.

https://medium.com/bull-market/sweaty-january-and-how-gyms-m...

Sure. But here's the thing: no-one is entitled to a profitable business. And dark patterns to make customers unwillingly subsidize your business is unacceptable.

Wrong, dark patterns are acceptable. They've been accepted for decades, as the OP said: these gym businesses have been like this as long as I've been alive too. Clearly, society accepts these business practices, or else an entire industry wouldn't employ them regularly.

That doesn’t make them acceptable, just not objectionable enough to get legal action. Those concepts aren’t equivalent outside of a direct democracy and it’s very easy to find things which a majority of Americans do not approve of but which have persisted because they’re not make-or-break issues for many voters but there’s a industry committed to maintaining the status quo.

This has also caused a fraction of the population to swear off gyms and make do whichever other way they can. That's the problem with businesses which become known for their slime and lack of added value. And makes starting a more honest / value-adding version of it that much harder: part of your audience is gone for good.

Reminds me of printers (especially ink-jets). I'll never even entertain the thought of owning one of those damn things again, no matter what some people might try to tell me about certain models.

I think something is "acceptable" when absolutely no one will lift a finger to change it. It's not just "just not objectionable enough": if this were the case, gyms wouldn't be hugely profitable, thriving businesses occupying lots of retail space. Clearly, gyms have little trouble getting lots of people to sign up for expensive memberships, in addition to not facing any scrutiny at all from the government.

Again, it’s not “absolute no one” - most people would. The question is whether it’s enough of priority for a much smaller group (legislators) to pass legislation and fund enforcement. Given that there are bigger evils in the world and most gym users are used to that sleaziness, the average legislator is probably not hearing that many complaints about this and almost certainly not hearing about it from donors other than the gym chains who are saying it’s great.

If the gym users are "used to that sleaziness" and are willing to give their money to these businesses (and apparently their bank account info too sometimes), then it's obviously "acceptable" to them.

If something is "unacceptable" to me, then I would not put up with it at all. A gym treating me this badly is unacceptable to me, so I would not sign up for membership with such a business. I may not be able to get much done legislatively, but I don't have to put up with those business practices myself: I can choose to not do business with them. A gym membership is not mandatory in life, the way buying food is for instance.

I feel like when people make bold statements about something being "unacceptable" as we see here, it's nothing more than grandstanding.

Rephrased: gyms have gotten used to dark patterns. (And city planning etc. - to be fair, any storefront space is still insanely expensive around here - at the same time when much of it is boarded up.) More gyms here are now using light industrial spaces - Still expensive but not as bad as storefronts.

Thanks for the link, the comparison to other retail shops was enlightening. I had not previously considered how much retail space a gym user uses in comparison to say, a grocery shopper.

Go to a local franchise (e.g. not LA Fitness) with a good reputation if you want a non-scammy gym. Somewhere where the owner is a part of the community and actually runs the day-to-day.

Recurring revenue for no services rendered is basically free money. Why would any business — in this day and age — give up free money?

I enjoyed talking to Lonnie the owner when I was in the area.

My only complaint is the gym can become a bit crowded, quite often I had to wait for the power racks.

It baffles me how there’s no more strength gyms in the area, most places I saw offered instructor led classes only.

I’ve been meaning to start a referral program for byebyefitness.com to help people find gyms like this. Thanks!

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