jeff yen

24 Hour Fitness is run by *tremendous* assholes

I walked into a 24 Hour Fitness today, for the first time in several years. If you've been reading this weblog since the beginning (and I do apologize if you have ), you may remember a previous post where I detailed the various aspects of their... hijinks... and you'd understand why.

Happily, it seems like I wasn't the only one who thought their general level of malicious incompetence was out of line, and a class action suit (Friedman v 24 Hour Fitness Inc, USA) was filed in 2009. They settled, and while the lawyers made out like bandits, the plaintiffs (i.e., everyone else) got either a $20 check or a coupon for 3 free months of access to any 24 hour fitness club (i.e. nothing).

Seeing as I signed up to be a plaintiff and then promptly forgot about the whole thing, I ended up getting the coupon. Which, in the end, worked out fairly well for me, seeing as I am now back in the States and like many of my countrymen, have achieved the general level of physical fitness where one runs out of breath getting up to go to the bathroom and breaks into a sweat when eating.

I also lucked out in that the coupon doesn't expire until August 20th, so earlier this afternoon I waddled into the Mission Valley 24 Hour Fitness to redeem my coupon.

After filling out a liability waiver and waiting for several minutes while the manager took his time making his way to the front desk, and then spent some time chatting up a slim Asian girl who'd come to work out, I was eventually allowed to accompany him to the membership sign-up area. The sign up process was fairly easy, and much to my surprise, the upselling was kept to a minimum.

I suppose it's possible they have realized the people least likely to respond to a sales pitch are those who have just done suing you.

The manager finished typing up some info on the computer, said he'd be right back, and I was just about to give them some credit for not fouling this up. Then he came back with a sheet of paper, which he folded up in some arcane way which made it exactly the wrong dimensions to put in my wallet, and stapled it.

This he then handed to me, with the admonishment to "keep a real good eye on this," as it was evidently the only record of my ever having a 3-month free pass to 24 Hour Fitness clubs. I would also have to present this piece of paper along with a picture ID every time I wanted to use the services at any of their facilities.

I looked at him steadily, and wondered aloud what would happen if this magical piece of paper was lost, damaged, or otherwise made inaccessible to me.

He suggested I purchase a membership, which would let me access each club with a fingerprint scan.

Ah... there it was.

I suggested that it might be possible, one might say even within the bounds of good sense, for him to enter some kind of record in the computer which would allow their vast network of fitness clubs, which were connected by a multimillion dollar IT network, to know that I was, in fact, allowed access to them. I was even so bold as to venture that this might in some small way alleviate the enormous pain in the ass he had just presented to me.

Oh-ho, he said with a twinkle in his eye, but the upside is: this is free.

I took some pains to explain to him that this coupon was not actually free; it was legal repayment for a debt incurred as a result of previous douchebaggery on their part, and that he and the company's owners were not in fact doing me some kind of personal favor. Additionally, the fact that they were making me jump through these hoops in order to claim this repayment -- which essentially costs them nothing -- bespeaks a fairly deep vein of bad faith.

Well, he suggested again as his smile became somewhat fixed, you could always sign up for a membership. He then proceeded to remind me that this was free.

So, I am now going to abuse the shit out of the equipment in every single one of the clubs I access in these next three months. The first time I actually started working out on a regular basis, my goal, aside from getting in shape, was to not waste the $40 or so per month I was spending on a membership at 24 Hour Fitness. My new goal is now to get back in shape while causing them as much monetary harm as possible, within the constraints of normal use.

Fuck 24 Hour Fitness.

On the way to Hankou (pic)

With two of my favorite people in China!