"We can't tell you the price over the phone."

The BBQ Pit
1

I called a local gym that recently open inquiring as to their rates. “Well we have about 9 different payment plans.” The he starts with the whole “Your name?” bit.

Look asshole. I called to ask you questions, not for you to ask ME questions.

“I just want your rates.” I said.

“Well it’s company policy not to give out our rates over the phone.” he explains. You have to come down there to discuss it.

“Forget it.” I muttered and hung up.

WHAT. THE. FUCK. I’m calling to potentialy give you business and you have the nerve to ask me to come down there and waste my time? The gym across the street(of which I am now a member) had no problem telliing me prices over the phone.

Your rates are irrelevant now as I wont do business with a company that has such a pretentious and asinine policy.

Take one of your many dumbbells and shove it up your ass sideways.

2

Much easier to give someone a hard sell face-to-face, dontcha know.

3

If you really want to rub it in,send them a copy of your contract with the gym across the street,with YOU LOST written across it.

4

Ask to talk to a manager. The line staff won’t have authority to go against company policy, but a manager may.

5

Might work, but I’m not willing to jump through hoops to give my money away, especially when I can simply go somewhere else without the hassle.

6

We had the same policy when I worked for a gym. But it never stopped me from ignoring it. But then, my manager was a complete jerk.

7

I think that, in part, this is because many gym memberships like cars do not have a set price. For instance, some gyms will sell a month-by-month membership at given rate. The same gym will sell you a two year membership that you can pay on a monthly basis, at a much lower rate, but with a two year commitment. Then there are the extras, like maybe a pool fee, or raquetball fee, or a towel fee. And then there are the times when the gym just needs a few more sales to make their monthly quota, and they’ll get really creative with their pricing.

I’m pretty sure that if pressured the gym guy would have given you some sort of list price, but that price and what you might have actually paid would have had nothing in common.

8

I absolutely agree that it’s a stupid practice. I realize it’s a marketing thing, but if signing up were as easy as registering on a website and giving your cc number, a lot more people would join in those moment’s of resolve.

“This year, I’m going to get healthy!” (click, click, click)

And then they’d feel like they accomplished something and the gym could pocket months and months of fees before they got back on line to cancel.

9

Was it that French place? La fitness?

Seriously, the point of most gyms is to sell you a contract you don’t need and set up a monthly deduction you can’t stop.

I found a $25 per month, no contract open 7 days/24 hrs good gym, and I found the rates over the phone. But most would not discuss rates without a visit.

10

They want you to come in so they can give you the tour, sit you down, ask what your “fitness goals” are and then launch into the hard sell. “If you sign up TODAY, but ONLY TODAY…” yadda yadda.

It’s a lot harder to do that over the phone.

11

I don’t belong anymore but I remember joining LIFETIME FITNESS to be overly easy. I was ready for a hard sale on signing up for X number of years but it never even got to that point.

Salesguy: Your joining fee is x$. Your monthly rate will be y$.

Me: How long do I have to sign up for?

Salesguy: You don’t. You can quit whenever you want. Just give us 30 days notice.

Me: Okay, I’ll sign up.

Salesguy: Sounds good. By the way, where do you work?

Me: For big company XYZ.

Salesguy: Oh, they have a corporate account here. So actually you get a discounted rate.

12

Devil’s Advocate time:

They may avoid quoting rates over the phone so that if competitor’s call, they won’t be undercut without a chance to make a sale. Gym A may have customer in front of them, and be offering the customer a discount over whatever rate Gym B says. After a few times of that, Gym B says “no rates over phone” to avoid that practice.

Or they might just want you there for the hard sell. Easy answer works too.

13

I think it’s partly the hard sell thing and partly that a place with a number of different rate plans realizes that most people who aren’t willing to at least come visit the place aren’t that serious, and thus, it’s not worth their time to spend 15 minutes on the phone walking through their rate plans with that person.

14

I don’t know how the gyms are around you, but here they are sleazier than the slimiest car salesman when trying to sell you a membership. The techniques I’ve seen used are really ridiculous and they do indeed have a number of confusing payment schemes.

In addition, the payment plans all seem to be extortionate at the ones I’ve seen. YMMV of course… This is in Montreal. My girlfriend used to live in Vancouver and claims that the gyms there were not only far superior to the ones here (better equipment, nicer atmosphere, better staff), but also much more reasonably priced.

15

I think that like car prices, gym memberships are very negotiable. This is why they want to know where the potential member works, lives, and the salary range.

16

The French gym mentioned above got my ass. The gym itself is nice and I have no problems with them; they gave me a decent rate. Their personal training program, on the other hand, suckered me in to a ridiculously expensive year-long contract when the salesperson made it sound like a month-to-month deal. My fault for not reading the contract closely enough. But then when I recently asked for the address to write to to cancel the contract, the manager danced around the issue and even at one point told me “You don’t need that.” :dubious:

I like the gym, it’s just their training program that feels slimy to me.

17

Just another in a long list of reasons to avoid exercising.

18

I don’t work for a gym, but this is why our store doesn’t negotiate prices or offer deals over the phone. If you call us, we’ll give you the advertised price, and only the advertised price. If you want a deal, come and see us and we’ll see if we can put something together.

And we don’t provide written quotes on deals, either. We’ve been burnt way, way too often by people taking our written deals to competitors, who promptly undercut us even further, and then people come back to us expecting stuff for below cost because they feel we have to “beat” the competitors. (Or they get our deal price-matched, and we lose the sale. Either way, it’s a bad thing.)

So, from this point of view, I can understand gyms not giving out package deals over the phone, but you’d think they could say “We tailor a package to your specific needs, so I can’t give you an exact price over the phone, but generally they start at $X and can go anywhere up to $Y”… That way, you, the potential customer have some idea what you’re likely to be up for, and the gym doesn’t have to worry about Other Gym undercutting them based on phone calls alone.