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Joining a Gym? Here's Why You Should Open a New Bank Account
- 8f2ab37a-ed6c 3y agoThe fact that you need to go this far to stop a vendor from charging you should be a big red flag in and of itself.
- m463 3y agoMost people are not aware. I went to a gym and moved further away. I had to send a certified letter to gym HQ to cancel my membership.
- nytesky 3y agoNow I do have separate bank accounts for Venmo, and PayPal and my primary banking, in the event, those accounts are hacked they can send out large amounts of money unauthorized. But in the case of a gym, I believe they could just send your debt to collections, you had an agreement with them Whether you pay by credit card or checking account?
- gitfan86 3y agoSure, but you can just ignore that, or tell them to sue you because the debt isn't valid. They are not going to take you to court and if they put it in your credit report you can dispute that as well. The only thing they can actually to do you is prevent you from going to the gym again
- mikestew 3y agoIf 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.)
- mayoff 3y agoIt’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-make-money-7d682ff5eeaf https://medium.com/bull-market/sweaty-january-and-how-gyms-m...
- mikestew 3y agoThanks 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.
- FireBeyond 3y agoSure. 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.
- shiroiuma 3y agoWrong, 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.
- acdha 3y agoThat 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.
- creer 3y agoThis 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.
- nekoashide 3y agoI have a bank account through cashapp for this very reason, easy to get an account and easy to burn it.
- sschueller 3y agoThe fact that you need to be able to "burn" a bank account is insane and shows how broken ACH is.
- beaeglebeached 3y agoHa ha wait until you find out you'll be put on a banking blacklist by ChexSystems if GP comment actually becomes strategically useful.
- tdeck 3y agoThere is an ACH return code for this: > R07: Authorization Revoked by Customer (adjustment entries)
- ValentineC 3y agoI'm continually amazed at how anyone can pull money from someone else's bank account in the US just from knowing their account and routing numbers — and they're on every check.
- shiroiuma 3y agoI'm continually amazed at how Americans still use checks... That, and the whole "tipping" thing. Completely insane.
- sschueller 3y agoI guess as the reserve currency you can get away with it. Also the fact that they don't use IBAN which would make things so much easier when wiring money. Instead you have to go looking for SWIFT codes and have intermediaries taking a piece.
- 3y ago
- euroderf 3y agoWhy only gyms ? I keep reading horror stories about people trying to terminate (for example) their cable service.
- unsignedint 3y agoUnderstanding local and state laws is crucial when joining a gym, as these laws often provide additional consumer rights. For example, Washington State has specific laws that benefited me with a "cool-off" period after feeling pressured to sign up. While I'm not familiar with the regulations in other regions, it's likely that similar protections exist due to prevalent issues in the fitness industry.
- Meekro 3y agoIn my experience, at least, the "gyms are impossible to cancel" meme is overstated. LA Fitness required me to mail in a letter to cancel; I can see how someone would object since I could easily sign up online, but printing and mailing the letter took maybe 10 minutes tops, and the cancellation was processed within a week. To me, that was good enough.
- kgdiem 3y agoIt took me several months to cancel. Once I found out it was a certified letter and I had to go wait at the post office I made https://byebyefitness.com https://byebyefitness.com
- tdeck 3y agoI like the concept, but the fact that you can't see the pricing until after you've put in your personal info seems shady.
- kgdiem 3y agoI used to have the pricing up, then someone said I should take it down. Since then you’re the second person to mention it. Any recommendation on where to display it?
- kyawzazaw 3y agoThat's not overstated. Your anecdote itself illustrates the steps and turnaround time one has to take to cancel. That's super slow. Did it take you a week to sign up and have to print and mail? Also, a lot of people don't have printers.
- m463 3y agoI had to send a certified letter. You underestimate the friction writing a letter entails, and you could probably assign a dollar amount to it.
- adamredwoods 3y ago
- throwaway22032 3y agoI don't understand why American gyms are set up in this way when in the UK almost everywhere lets you pay by the month with no cancellation fee. One of our biggest chains Puregym has something like a 20 quid joining fee that you can usually get around with a promotion. That's it. Most of the gyms have day passes for about £7 as well, more expensive in bigger cities sure. I don't understand how the "economics" can be so different. It's a box with some machines in it.
- alimw 3y agoI dunno, my local (council-affiliated "Better" brand) gym claims exactly that in its advertising — that you pay by the month with no cancellation fee — but it turns out when you go to cancel that they have already laid claim to the next month's payment too and there's not a damn thing you can do about it. On that day I certainly wished I had it on its own special account that I could just close.
- neillyons 3y agoI noticed this too. That is pretty dodgy considering Better is council affiliated. I was able to avoid them taking the next months payment by cancelling my direct debit from my banking app. I also recommend virtual cards https://monzo.com/help/monzo-plus/virtual-cards-what/ https://monzo.com/help/monzo-plus/virtual-cards-what/ for making payments online, and Apple Pay for paying for things in person.
- theriddlr 3y agoDavid Lloyd in the UK is like Hotel California: "You can check-out any time you like, but you can never leave!" the 3-month contract is actually 4 months the 12-month contract is actually 15 months Impossible to get out of the contract unless a you have doctor's letter for injury or you move further than 20 miles from a branch. There's no point signing up on a contract either as they raise prices mid-contract.
- prirun 3y ago> Never give out your primary bank account information to any merchant. This is pretty ridiculous advice, since every time you write a check, the recipient receives your bank account information. It's printed right at the bottom of the check!
- riggsdk 3y agoHow common is writing checks in America these days? In Denmark it is more or less completely phased out (with few exceptions). Nobody uses them anymore in practice. In Denmark I've had no issues cancelling my gym memberships directly online but haven't been to that many different ones.
- NoZebra120vClip 3y agoA few situations apply for me. I write checks to churches when I show up in person, even for a $1.00 votive candle. I can toss it into the collection basket or the donations jar for donuts and coffee. However, more churches are improving their online donations, and I write fewer checks as a result. I also cut checks as part of online bill payments. If the bank can't identify an electronic recipient, then the payment gets mailed out on a paper check. This happens for my landlord, and anything I can't set up for AutoPay from the other side. I can even send money to friends this way: anyone with a postal address, and I don't pay fees or postage for this Bill Pay service. In fact, I make use of Bill Pay so much that I didn't reorder checks for one account. My father was mystified by that decision.
- krinchan 3y agoBillpay Checks are actually Cashier's Checks and are drawn from account numbers that aren't your account, btw. It's one of the reasons it's far more secure to pay any bill requiring a check this way. Check fraud is massively on the rise. They don't even need a physical check, just the info. They're printing their own checks now and depositing them electronically. They also hire homeless right off the street to go in and cash the checks for them. Homeless keeps $100, the fraudsters make the rest. If you're using checks the way you say you are, it's only a matter of time before you have to deal with swapping out bank account numbers.