I had to cancel my gym membership because I was moving, and it required me to send a physical letter. I did this, but found out later that somehow I owed like 2 dollars, so they didn’t count my cancellation request because my account wasn’t up to date (should be illegal). They continued to bill me the entire membership fee, but my credit card had changed, so they sent my account to a collections agency. Right when I was trying to get a mortgage to buy a house. Cost me hundreds of dollars and much more in annoyance. Thanks The Edge for doing that to your previously loyal customer! It ought to be a law that once a customer informs you via email, text, phone or mail (and all must be easily found) subscription services can no longer accrue new charges.
LA Fitness allows you to either mail in the cancellation form or submit it in person. I was also cancelling due to a move, so I printed out the form and trekked out to the nearest location for a final workout and the piece of mind that my cancellation was complete.
Lo and behold, you cannot submit your cancellation form without a Manager present. Okay, when does the Manager arrive? _Usually_ around 9:00AM is the response I got. I have to get home for a meeting at 8:30AM, so is there a mailbox I can drop this in? No. Can I leave it with you (the staff member attending the front desk) to hand to the Manager? No. Will the Manager be here around 5:00PM if I come back after work? No.
Please note that I bear no ill will towards the pleasant staff member that was helping me.
There was a class action lawsuit against LA Fitness about sending letters to cancel. I guess they finally allowed it to be done in person but had you jump through hoops to find a manager. They “lost” my letter a couple times until I sent it certified.
There's a business to be had in generating and mailing those letters certified for someone. For $10, you can have it printed and mailed by Lob certified and still have a few bucks margin, without the customer having to leave their home. They’d then have the certified tracking number to demonstrate it was delivered.
This should absolutely not be necessary, but is a shim until a regulator kicks gyms in the shorts over their predatory practices.
FWIW, https://www.mailaletter.com can do certified w/ return receipt, and there's also a service called Trim (https://www.asktrim.com) that can do cancellations for you. In my experience, some companies have explicit policy to not accept cancellation requests on your behalf from Trim, but it works for many.
This behavior is everywhere in the gym industry. It is so bad that the last time I joined a gym, I paid for a year up front with a physical check. I told them i don’t have credit or debit cards (lie) and can only pay by check.
At the end of the year, I walked away and never got any letters about paying a renewal or anything.
A lot of people will say "paying by check is such a hassle! I don't even have checks! It's so 1980s!" But you know what? It's a lot less of a hassle than canceling your membership when paying by credit/debit card.
And if you don't have checks for your checking account, you can get order them online from walmart.com for $10 + shipping. Or, if you still use a bank that has a local branch, you can go into the branch and ask for a single printed check. They cost a couple of bucks.
> Gym membership cancellation practices are in desperate need of regulation.
Agreed, and I also hate being stuck in 12-month contracts as well. I will never join a gym that makes me sign a long term commitment like that. The last local gym I joined was pretty cool about this. They had higher month to month prices and discounted longer term memberships. Gives you a chance to see how you like it after a few months.
I used to buy prepaid memberships to 24 hour fitness from Costco. Same with magazines like economist
, just bought a prepaid digit subscription. Most places sell prepaid memberships because of the gifting aspect.
That's one insanity I don't understand why companies can get away with. They can set up bureaucratic processes and even when you follow them, they "lose" your material, raise some weird objection or ignore it. Same happens with health insurances and hospitals. They ignore you whenever they feel like it but the payment and collections clock keeps ticking. I have heard it was the same in 2008 and later when people requested mortgage relief and the banks just ignored them for months and years.
It amazes me how successful consumer hostile strategies are in recent times. It sort of flies in the face of most economic models that claim markets self-regulate. This includes businesses in industries which aren't massive and monopolistic and even have competitors. When all your competitors decide to indirectly collude with one business's successful consumer hostile strategies, it becomes the norm and another barrier to entry for a competitor to come in with a better offering.
In theory, consumer hostile practices should exist at a discount so a reputable business that isn't consumer hostile should be able to offer better products/services at a higher price point and let consumers decide if they want a hostile or non-hostile market. Some may claim that consumers just want cheap above all else and the market regulates to that, hostile or not. I dismiss this and claim the issue is that a price point signal doesn't give me enough information to tell me if a business is consumer hostile or not. Paying more absolutely does not guratentee a better consumer experience, it could just be a business operating at higher margins and that seems to be the norm--a business disguised as offering higher quality products/services or better experience to justify the price point. This model seems to work just as well and captures a subset of people willing to risk paying more for a hopefully more consumer friendly experience.
The issue with all of this is, as a consumer, you can't know without trying, and are limited by anecdata of trial and error while businesses often have significantly larger pools of information and therefor leverage to work with and strategize against consumers on price points and margin padding. Reviews and that sort of shared information are already gamed with so much misinformation and disinformation that these consumer hostile strategies continue to hold well (and are legal). I can try limiting reviews to a trusted network by word of mouth so I know people aren't hustling me (mostly, for now) but that only helps when someone in my trust network has a recommendation. Often, they don't, and they too have limited selection so their anecdata is a small sample size as well, meaning a better consumer experience can exist at a better price point.
As such, I'm not sure how you resolve this asymmetry in information in free markets. Consumers almost never have leverage unless they collude together because they lack scale and information that come with the resources of owning a business. Here you have hundreds, thousands, millions of customers you can sample from and test different strategies against, optimizing for your margins. As a consumer, I don't have the resources to do this and since consumer information is largely disjoint, I'm always left at a disadvantage hoping some business won't screw me over as many frequently do.
What's worse is that if a consumer hostile business is successful enough to accumulate enough resources to play the continous rebrand/rename game, I can't possibly even build a reputation against something I consume. I'm instead encouraged to push to established businesses and further entrench the massive market share holders where we tend towards a different set of monopolistic anti-consumer strategies.
They are selling aspirations and tend to have a local monopoly based on location. There are many gyms, but there aren’t many gyms in a particular locale convenient for whatever aspirational schedule exists.
Because of that, it’s really not in a cheap gyms interest to not be assholes.
Nicer gyms like the Y or a Country/Social club use things like childcare or social factors to increase the friction of leaving. More serious gyms use the trainer relationship and cost more or have fewer amenities.
I had to print and send them a letter. Or talk to the manager. Who is only there a few days a week. And no one knows when.
Obligatory:
“But the plans were on display…”
“On display? I eventually had to go down to the cellar to find them.”
“That’s the display department.”
“With a flashlight.”
“Ah, well, the lights had probably gone.”
“So had the stairs.”
“But look, you found the notice, didn’t you?”
“Yes,” said Arthur, “yes I did. It was on display in the bottom of a locked filing cabinet stuck in a disused lavatory with a sign on the door saying ‘Beware of the Leopard.”
It took me seven years to cancel Planet Fitness after I moved a hundred miles away. Letter after letter, nothing...finally made a trip back home one day and had time to stop and deal with it.
Had the exact same experience. Moved out of state, had to continue paying for over a year until I had another reason to go back there and cancel it. Of course, there was no part of the process that couldn't have been done over the phone, or on the web.
And this is relevant to the article, since Planet Fitness is specifically called out for being among the shadiest practitioners of this tactic.
Gyms. Walk in with a wad of cash. Tell them you want to pre-pay for 6 months. Show them the cash. No credit cards, no atm numbers, no ssns, no drivers licenses, nothing. They will refuse. Then give them your phone number and let them know if they change their mind to call you. Leave. THEY call EVERY time.
Ha, I made a similar comment about my experience with a gym elsewhere in this thread. Gyms are up near the top of worst practices when it comes to this kind of thing. There really should be legal ramifications for companies that do this.
Seriously regret signing up for that gym. The sales person lied about so much shit in hindsight. Signed up for the medium of the road package - tried to downgrade to the basic package told me I couldn't despite telling me when I signed up I could hop between them anytime.
My friend had a good suggestion I used. When you're signing up, I had them write down and sign beside the big lie I thought they were telling me about cancellation. Then when I cancelled and mentioned the terms, the manager said "unfortunately we would need to have that in writing". And then I produced my contract with it added in writing, signed by their staff member. Ridiculous the lengths one must go to have them follow through on what they say.
Gyms are the worst about this. Typically they make it very difficult to cancel and say something like you have to notify them 30 days in advanced and pay for 30 days after you cancel. Effectively making you pay for two months you don't want. Almost every cheap gym is doing this.
I had this almost exact experience with Philadelphia Rock Gym. They sent a couple emails "threatening" to send my account to collections over $50 I did not authorize them to bill me for (repeatedly said in writing to cancel my account, they kept my membership open anyway). I just ignored them, nothing ever came of it.
For Crunch Fitness, it took me 5 membership cancellation requests, 3 calls, 2 in person visits, and 4 months to cancel my month-to-month gym membership.
Small claims cases against gyms are remarkably easy to win. Judges know the bs gyms put their members through when they try to cancel so the courts are already inclined to believe the other party
In most US states at least, you can only sue for actual damages in small claims court. Punitive, reputational or other things have to go through regular court.
Important clarification: they sold your account to a collections agency. They made more than what you actually owed them by doing that, which is probably why they did that.
> They made more than what you actually owed them by doing that
This makes absolutely zero sense and does not happen. Why would the collections agency pay more for debt than it's worth? Why wouldn't they sell all their accounts then? Free increase in profits!
They make more, across all accounts, than they would in lost time/expenses -pursuing- those debts. But the collection agency did not pay them > X to collect on X. Far from it; the collection agency paid them a small percentage of the total debt for the 'right' to try and collect on it.
I've been pursued by a collection agency for a bogus account with a very low value. The collections agency tacked on a ton of additional costs. Hundreds of dollars. Related to them processing the account, and said that I owed them for it. So my understanding of how it works, and maybe I'm completely wrong, that's possible too, is that collections agency stand to gain far more than just the original amount owed, if they can add their overhead costs to the account.
>Important clarification: they sold your account to a collections agency. They made more than what you actually owed them by doing that, which is probably why they did that.
I had this experience some years back.
The obnoxious collections agent (no robocalls for that stuff back then) tried to bully me.
I just laughed and wished them luck getting a penny out of me. Never heard from them again.
Nothing on my credit report either.
Perhaps things are different now.
Something to remember is that corporations (including collections agencies) have to pay lawyers if they want to take legal action against you.
And at $250-$400/hour, unless the "debt" is in the many thousands, it's generally not worth it to sue.
Note that I'm not suggesting that anyone stiff their creditors. Rather, it's useful to keep that bit of information in mind when dealing with unfair/unethical attempts to extort money[0] from you.
[0] Especially when a "collection agency" (read legal extortion racket) purchases your "debt" for pennies on the dollar.
> Important clarification: they sold your account to a collections agency. They made more than what you actually owed them by doing that, which is probably why they did that.
Um, no. Collection agencies buy debt at a discount, and make a profit if they manage to collect the full amount. It would make no sense for them to buy debt for more than what is owed.
I can't edit my original post now, but I misread that the account grew from more than just $2 before it was sold. If the gym sold a $2 account to a collections agency, the collection agency buying it lines up with my experience of them tacking on hundreds of dollars in overhead costs when they try to collect.
