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Tuesday, March 10, 2015

Why not call it an exercise free zone?

For some reason this post at Instapundit caught my attention.
FRONTIERS IN GENDER FLUIDITY: Planet Fitness cancels woman’s membership after her complaints of transgender woman in locker room.
Read it if you have not. The woman's membership was cancelled because she complained to other women after management refused to act as Planet Fitness is, by its motto, a "Judgement Free Zone". Rather than stop with that post I thought it would be interesting to see what kind of company boasts of being judgment free. To be charitable the corporate website looks like a throwback to the 90's with its lavender text on white or white text on lavender. Another relic from the 90's was the warning that everything on the site including the text was copyrighted which I found under Terms of Use. In the early 90's there was no such thing as a web designer as practically everyone built his own site. These people were rather proud of their work and it was easy to steal graphics. One woman I remember made a big to do about her java butterflies that wafted across the page claiming they were her intellectual property. Petty I know, but Planet Fitness treats its mundane prose as if it was the The Rubaiyát of Omar Khayyám.
The site also boasts of 900 fitness centers and a membership of 5 million is frequently cited on the web but not on the company site. Do the math. Are we to believe that each center services 5,500 customers on average? That would be 183 unique visitors everyday for a month. The reason I'm hung up on numbers is the astounding number of complaints this outfit generates. At pissedconsumer.com it generated 717 complaints with 1 resolution. At consumeraffairs.com it racked up 335. It has been pilloried by the Huffington Post, Gawker and the New York Times.
Huffington Post:
A woman says she was told her "toned body" was too "intimidating" for other gym members to handle, but the gym in question contends that's not exactly true.
Tiffany Austin told KTVU that she was working out at a Planet Fitness Gym in Richmond, Calif. on Monday when an employee approached her.
According to Austin, the staff member told her "excuse me we've had some complaints you're intimidating people with your toned body. So can you put on a shirt?”
Austin agreed, but as the first staff member went to go get her a free shirt, another staff member again told her that her body was too fit to be shown. It was at that point that Austin said she asked for a refund for her gym membership and bolted.
Gawker:
Planet Fitness, a shitty gym which no one should ever join, would have its customers believe that all of this anti-strenuous-workout propaganda is for the benefit of its own patrons—all part of their "Judgement [SIC] Free Zone® philosophy, which means members can relax, get in shape, and have fun without being subjected to the hard-core, look-at-me attitude that exists in too many gyms." In fact, the opposite is true. Planet Fitness would like to cultivate a membership full of people who despise exercise and are unlikely to become committed regular users of their gym facilities, while continuing to pay them membership fees. Planet Fitness can do this quite effectively by recruiting people who fear the concept of exercise, soothing them with assurances that no real exercise will be taking place in the gym that they join.
New York Times:
Albert Argibay, a bodybuilder and a state correction officer, was at a Planet Fitness gym with 500 pounds of weight on his shoulders one afternoon this month when the club manager walked over and told him it was time to leave. Mr. Argibay, the manager explained, had violated one of the club’s most sacred and strictly enforced rules: He was grunting....
At Planet Fitness gyms, grunters and other rule-breakers are treated to an ear-rattling siren with flashing blue lights and a public scolding. The “lunk alarm,” as the club calls it, is so jarring it can bring the entire floor to a standstill. (A lunk is defined, on a poster, as “one who grunts, drops weights, or judges.”)
What amazes me is the arrogance demonstrated by a company that thinks it can do business on its own terms; that it can treat its paying customers with contempt when they show too much enjoyment form their workouts. From where do they recruit their help? From the application pool of people who couldn't get hired as crossing guards? I had more freedom in grade school recesses and that was with Catholic nuns!
Do a Google search of gyms in your town. They have sprung up like video arcades and miniature golf course did years ago and most of them will meet the same fate. My own preference is Anytime Fitness which gives you a key leaves you alone. It has 2700 gyms and is accessible 24/7.

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