I got annoyed when a local club wouldn’t post rates on its website or even discuss them via email. A little Googling turned up many other cases of people complaining about this around the U.S.
So what’s their angle? Do they try to get more out of people who look affluent? Charge less for lithe young women? And is this a viable long-term business strategy in a 21st century environment in which people have become accustomed to comparison shopping with sites like PriceGrabber.com and Kayak.com? It sure turned me off.
I’ve checked out a few gyms, and on every application that I’ve seen, the company wants to know your income and where you live. I think that they DO give different quotes to different people. They’ll also try to sell additional packages to you, if they think you’ll stand for it. The salespeople seem to work on commission, and of course they’re going to try to get you to pay as much as possible.
I think that the biggest ripoff might be the enrollment fee. Why in the world would a gym need to charge a member several hundred dollars just to sign up? Especially if the member is signing a contract?
It is a sales tactic designed to bring you to the club so a salesman can try to sell you face to face which increases their close ratio over you just looking it up on the internet.
My WAG is that they want to get you into the gym so they can do a hard sell but really will take what they can get (within reason).
My gym has posted rates inside the premises but since it is cheaper than the same-branded gyms in different cities, they don’t want to post it online since that clientele will get annoyed.
Heh. That’s easy. If you (as your average person, not us smart people) are given a choice between 25 bucks a month (with a 200 dollar enrollment fee) or 30 bucks a month (without one) they will choose the former.
Our gym has two options:
x+50 enrollment, x biweekly, year long contract (must pay the whole year)
x enrollment, x+2 biweekly, month-to-month cancellation
So, doing the math, if I stay for just about a year, I pay about the same as the yearly contract. If I want out early, I am much better with the monthly. If I stay longer than a year, I get the same rate for three years with the monthly. I get no guaranteed rate with the yearly AND have to pay the enrollment fee again.
Yet, I asked who the hell would buy the year long contract and they said about 60% of people do because THE BIWEEKLY RATE IS LOWER.
I find them cagier about the terms of your contract. The gym itself is a bait for you to sign an auto-debit contract that is difficult for you to sever and easy for the financial side of the gym to keep taking your money w/o giving you anything in return; chances are you’ll quit the gym far easier and sooner than you’ll quit their contract. The debt collector I worked for years ago bought Ballys debt and lots of it. Gym contracts are cash cows for the financial arm of the company that owns the gym. Google ‘Ballys’ and ‘debt collector’, sit back and enjoy the vitriol. Hell, it even extends to Curves; when I joined I had to pay the whole year up front since I wouldn’t let them debit my checking account every month as they wanted.
They also like to charge an enrollment fee so people become afraid to quit fearing that should they want to start again they will have to pay another enrollment fee.
It also allows the gym to collect money from members during slow times of the year (summer) where someone may want to stop in the spring and start up again in the fall.
I worked in a gym selling memberships for a [very] short period of time. It was a local gym, not a chain, but I can definitively say that we did not give people different prices based on income, etc. There was one price for everyone, though of course there were promotions and discounts available depending on the circumstances. I was never answering phones or involved in any discussion of people needing to come in to get the price, but I do know that we really wanted to show people around and talk about the benefits before talking about price. Basically get them to really want to join before putting the number out there. As others suggested, I would think this is why they don’t post the prices online.
Hey I’ve found this is true as well. I think they don’t fix prices because they can quote as high a price as possible, then gradually reduce it to earn the most money.
I was staying at a hotel with an attached gym for several months, and I used the gym as a hotel guest. Just after I arrived, the hotel changed hands, and the fitness center had to get all their members to change the Direct Debit details. According to the front desk, they lost 1/3 of their membership - 1/3 of members were paying for something they did not actually use, and when forced to do something, made the choice to cancel. The fitness center had to lose staff and start a new membership drive.
I also knew some members at my gym who got really upset when new members who joined during the membership drive had a much lower monthly rate (as in 2/3rd the usual rate) than long-term existing members. I think the “cancel in November, rejoin cheaply in January” crowd also ticked off some people (including me). Once you have joined, you should not be able to benefit from the joining discount again.
If you want to join, join. If you’d use it regularly.
I’d rather be in shape than waddle around as a fat, rich guy.
Anyone had any luck with meeting with one of their “membership counselors” and saying “Look, I’m going to join a gym and I can afford $XX/month. I could join Bubba’s Boxing Dive for that, but I’d rather join here. Do you have any sort of program or deal that’ll get me in at that price?”
I don’t see what’s so unusual about gym memberships in this regard. Have you ever called an auto dealer to ask what the price is on such-and-such a car? I can’t even get a straight answer from them when I walk in the door! (Except at a Saturn dealer. And some are starting to follow that model occasionally, but not often.)
In my job, I often need to shop around for some specialized piece of equipment that’s in the several-hundred dollar range. And I can easily find several suppliers who show their whole catalog on line, and I have my pick of who to buy from. But none of those catalogs show prices. They all want me to phone or email requesting a quote. Obviously, they want the opportunity to be a salesman to me. I wish they were more interested in helping me buy what I want to buy.
You can get the price of a car on virtually any manufacturer’s web site. You may, of course, try to negotiate a better price than that, but it’s not as if the price is hidden. And you most definitely can call a dealership and negotiate price over the phone. I’ve done it over email too.
I’ve never understood gym memberships. It seems like, for the price of a year long contract, I could buy a good weight bench and a decent treadmill on craigslist and then I don’t have to commute to my workout.
And you could always do pushups, situps and run for free. You could do that for a long time before it “just wasn’t enough” and you require a mechanically assisted workout. But nobody seems to exhaust those options before waddling in for their annual January guilt trip.
Combine that with the skeezy nature of the sales process and I just don’t understand why people flock to gyms.
It’s understandable if you’re going to make good use of the Olympic sized pool or the rock climbing walls. But most people just seem to lift weights and run on treadmills. Why do they pay so much for that?