I am beyond pissed right now, probably because I had to spend more money than I budgeted. Tell me if I’m off base before I rip the gym manager a new one.
My gym has an offer this month where “Current members who prepay one year get 20% OFF” (verbatim from the flyer.)
For me, my annual member ship is $489.60. According to my math, with the discount this is $391.68.
However, when I go to pay, I am charged $460.80. It turns out my annual membership is already discounted 15% from the monthly fee of $48 a month, so by renewing for a year, I only get another 5% off, not 20%.
When I pointed out that the sign said 20%, not 5%, the ladies at the counter just shrugged and gave me the business card of the gym manager. I think the sign should have made mention of the existing discount, then I could have budgeted the money better.
If you were aware that you were already receiving 15% off, then it would seem that a 20% would simply replace the previous discount. I don’t see how they would be in the wrong there. They said 20% off, not 20% off including any discounts you already have. It probably even says in the fine print, “Not valid with any other offers or discounts.”
If you were not aware that your rate was already discounted, and you thought that the $40.80 a month was the regular membership price, then I would agree you were a bit misled, and it would be reasonable to assume that the 20% off would be off of that price.
I agree, call the manager. You have been a client, with a good standing, presumably. It can’t hurt, and he may make the advertised discount in your favor.
I certainly wouldn’t threaten any sort of legal action or anything, but if you describe your situation to the manager, there is a good chance that he will go ahead and honor the deal that you thought you were getting, at least for this upcoming year.
If there is the slightest chance that you would cancel your membership over the misunderstanding, then it is in his interests to make you happy.
The wording of the offer is obviously misleading, intentionally so. I do not know how a reasonable person could see otherwise.
If I tell an existing customer “Because you are an existing customer, I’ll give you a 20% discount,” and nothing else, the rather obvious implication is that I am offering 20% off the price the customer is paying now. The idea that it’s 20% off a theoretical price the customer isn’t paying, and in fact might never have paid, and in fact might never even have seen, is farcical. NO ONE will take the offer that way unless it’s clearly explained that way.
This is especially true in the case of gyms, where the list price is sheer fantasy; no one pays it, and it’s often not even written down anywhere you could see it.
The OP should absolutely raise hell with the manager.
“20% off for existing members” means 20% off what you are paying. Not 20% off what they would charge new members.
Did you actually pay it? At the point where they showed you the amount you should have refused to pay. If you did pay after they told you the amount, you have a weak argument to go back and complain. But I would complain anyway. If you paid by credit card you could dispute the charge.
However, you still got a discount that is better than what you get if your money sat in a savings account.
I’ve dealt with this gym manager before. She’s rather tone deaf and unwilling to bend (you have to give 30 days notice if you want to hiatus your membership for vacation.) I’ve already paid because I love the gym and love classes, but I let my fellow gym rats know to Caveat Emptor.
Apparently it meant Current members who prepay one year get 20% OFF (instead of the X% off they may be currently getting).
Whereas you interpreted it as Current members who prepay one year get 20% OFF (of whatever price they are currently paying).
The message as written is incomplete, but not inherently misleading. The first interpretation I’ve listed here is no less valid than the second one, it’s just a lot less desirable to the client.
Call the manager, explain what you took the message to mean, and ask what he can do for you. Be nice, assume they didn’t intend to mislead as they may have reasonably assumed that you knew you were already getting a discount. They may offer some additional discount for the misunderstanding.
In sum, reading your posts it sounds like you already had some awareness you were getting a discount, and that’s why you were paying annually instead of monthly. Perhaps you didn’t perceive it that way but if the yearly fee is less than 12 times the monthly fee then it is indeed discounted. It would have been nice if they had pointed that out beforehand, but it’s not unreasonable for them to figure that you know what you’re paying and why.
I quite disagree. It’s only misleading to those who make certain assumptions – which are NOT inevitable – about what it is saying. And I will say with confidence that you have no way to know the intentions of the writer. I don’t see how a reasonable person could not realize this.
That’s not necessarily true at all. It could quite well mean – and in this case does indeed mean – 20% off the year’s total if it were paid monthly instead of yearly.
Presumably new members can only get 15% off for paying yearly instead of monthly.
It’s unclear, but there’s a degree of caveat emptor here. It’s like complaining that a used car dealer charged you more than the fair price for a car, or that you have to pay a the real estate agency cartel $30,000 for doing 15 hours work. Gyms are just notorious for pricing dishonesty and for making you jump through hoops to cancel…
If someone is just talking and stuff with friends, then there are certain assumptions that may be made that may not turn out to be true.
If you are advertising for your services, you need to make sure that what you put in your advertisement is what you mean to say. The intentions of the writer are to get people to sign up for this discount and get them to pay for a full year up front, I have every confidence that this is the case.
That they put no fine print on it, that it just says 20% off, the intent of the writer is to cause one to believe that if they pay the whole year up front, they will save 20%.
I was initially thinking that Ivylass had just missed the fine print, but as that is not the case, as there was no fine print to be missed, then it is misleading for them.
Either the gym’s PR is incompetent or it is cynical, in either case, the members should not be punished for it.
Why would you think that, when the flyer specifically says that you get 20% off for paying annually, and makes no mention whatsoever about new members?
There is no mention of new members, and no mention of 15%, what would lead you to that presumption?
There is a special for new members, “New members join for only $20.18!*”, with the * being “applies to enrollment fee.”
I did technically get 20% off, but the flyer doesn’t mention that the annual fee is already discounted 15%, so you’re really only getting another 5% off.
Not only could it mean that, it’s precisely what I would assume it meant. It didn’t say “an additional 20% off” or “20% off your existing rate”. I would also assume that I was already getting a discount if I was pre-paying for a year when there was an option to pay monthly simply because if there wasn’t a discount, I wouldn’t have chosen to pre-pay.
Ans as for why they didn't advertise it as "an additional 5% discount", well, just because the OP was getting a 15% discount doesn't mean all the existing customers were - there were certainly some paying monthly who weren't getting any discount at all and perhaps some got only a 10% discount for prepaying.
And that’s exactly what happens – they pay the for the year, and with this special offer they save 20% off the by-the-month pricing, as opposed to the 15% they’d previously been saving.
If a company puts out an advertisement that is ambiguous, and can have multiple valid interpretations, then it needs to honor the more generous of a valid interpretation.
No sure exactly how it plays out legally, but I know you are not allowed to put out intentionally misleading advertisements, accidently misleading isn’t all that much better.