(caught the spelling mistake afterwards ugh)
If it was me, I was nice the first time, now I’d just tell them to f**k off.
With a “If I have to tell you to cancel my membership another time it will attract a $10 fee for each subsequent response from me, I expect your response in no less than 5 days”
I hate gyms so much. My wife’s gym closed and moved and they never told her and kept charging her. She got charged for months for a gym she literally never stepped foot into or signed up for or was told that her contract was sold to another location. And when she called them to ask about it they had the audacity to say they couldn’t contact corporate and that the manager was busy talking to the regional manager. You know, corporate. So corporate was literally there. Idk if there’s any sort of statute of limitations but I have half a mind to take them to small claims court over it.
Also Expedia. Stole money from us. The website said no credit card required but it was a lie. When my wife went to get the rental car they wouldn’t give it to her. Expedia wouldn’t refund her nor give her store credit for another rental. Even ignoring the false advertising, she didn’t get the rental. It wasn’t like something where some.kod accidentally buys something on some.game and you can argue “well you actually received the goods so we can’t refund you” because she literally never received the goods.
But I shouldn’t give this shit any mental energy. It’s ancient history. I’ve moved on. My mental sanity is worth more than the time I’ve spent stressing about it and the money we could potentially get back, but it’s hard to really believe that sometimes.
It’s insane that this happens. I’ve had memberships at six different gyms over my lifetime. For all but one, I’ve had to explicitly tell them that I want to renew, or else the membership gets automatically cancelled at the end of the contract term.
Paying to not use a service is peak gym membership logic 😭
This is why I use a privacy.com card for just about everything. Anybody gets hacked or tries to pull some shady shit I can just turn off the card and it doesn’t affect anybody but them.
Some gyms require your account & routing number to sign up.
Wow, that’s some really invasive stuff. If a gym ever asked for my account and routing number I would just go somewhere else, but I understand not everybody has that option.
Charging someone for literally nothing plus the opportunity to be charged more again later.
I always use virtual cards for any subscriptions these days. If it takes more than a couple clicks to cancel a service, I just delete the virtual card instead.
But if you just turn off your virtual card, if they have not agreed to end your membership don’t they just send you to collections?
Can I assume you use https://privacy.com/ for this? If so unfortunately only Americans can utilize that service.
There is also this:
https://wise.com/help/articles/1AqrRndtxosydM2GLR3U6T/getting-started-with-your-wise-digital-card
You can get the digital card if your Wise account has a registered address in Australia, Brazil, Canada, the EEA (European Economic Area), Japan, Malaysia*, New Zealand, Philippines, Singapore, Switzerland, the United Kingdom and the US*
*You can only get a digital Wise Multi-Currency Card for your Personal account, not your business account, if you live in Malaysia.
Because rest of the world is civilized enough to not have gyms that do such an exorbitant thing. And also we have access to Revolut.
Of course, there are outliers, which is sad and I feel for them.
Same issue elsewhere, eg Germany
Stuff like this is why I’d rather be fat than go to a gym.
That’s like saying you’re gonna get back at road ragers by crashing your car into a tree
Lmao I’d call the bank and just tell them cancel the card on file and send a new one. Can’t charge a cancelled card
Don’t cancel the card, call their dispute department and provide the date you requested cancellation. They will take it from there.
That’s assuming it is in fact a credit card.
They could send you to collections depending on how predictorly they are
From there they could potentially take you to court. However, I doubt it since that would cost them a fortune.
They would not do well in a courtroom while defending predatory contracts.
How so?
The trial will be short as you likely signed a contract. You can’t just not pay because you don’t like the terms.
The judge follows the law not what is right. We need laws to defend people against predatory companies.
Just because a company puts a bunch of shit into a long contract and you sign it doesn’t mean it’s enforceable. They would say they asked to cancel the membership and there is proof(email). It doesn’t matter what gimmicks a company comes up with to make cancelling difficult. A judge would see right through those tactics.
Exactly. And, often, if one part of the contact is unenforceable, the entire thing is void.
So, as soon as they try to do illegal shit in the contract, it should be deemed unenforceable and thus void.
Should.
I wish there was a government entity or agency that just went around decimating people’s lives for predatory practices like this. Oh? You wanna be an LLC and try an MLM? Straight to jail. You want to capitalize on teenagers’ insecurity by raping their privacy and feeding them ads? Jail. You think you’re gonna make it big by trapping people in predatory gym contracts and make it nearly impossible to leave without paying a bunch of fees? Believe it or not, directly to jail.
The jury, comprised of people who certainly have been fucked similarly, can find in the gyms favor and award them a whopping $1 in damages.
Good luck convincing regular people bullshit cancellation policy is a gold reason to make someone pay
You’ll never see a real courtroom. Instead you’ll only have access to a kangaroo fake court with a fake judge chosen by the company.
That’s not how it works unfortunately
I hate to burst your bubble but yes they can. https://www.creditcards.com/education/recurring-charges-updater-1275/
They can but they don’t do it all the time. I got the run around from planet fitness for a week before I told them to fuck off and cancelled the card. Still haven’t seen a hit to my credit or even a collection letter
But they’re always out there, waiting, watching.
AMEX specifically does this. I had so many problems managing a corporate account with them because dumb salespeople would sign up for bad subscription services they wouldn’t cancel. I’d change their Amex number but they would still carry over the charges from the card we’d deactivated for fraud/theft.
Because of crazy credit card laws, cancelling the card isn’t enough to end the subscription service. If they were charging a new charge like McMaster charging you for a new part, they would need the card but a magazine subscription or gym membership don’t give a fuck.
You’re not understanding what they are saying. They are not refusing to cancel the membership, they are just putting one more option in front of you before you cancel.
Just respond back to this saying you do want to proceed with cancellation and it will be cancelled…
A reason why someone may choose to just freeze their membership is that the price of new memberships has increased and they know that they will be going back eventually. It may actually be a better choice to freeze and keep your current rate if you plan to go back later and the different in price for a new membership is more than $10 a month more expensive.
Nope. The demand was made clearly, and they did not do it. This is a refusal. Even if you want to frame it as a road bump, it is one that can readily be misconstrued as a wall; and either way is absolutely illegal.
It’s so clearly not a refusal. It is absolutely not illegal to offer alternatives to cancelling before cancelling. Is it annoying to have to send an extra email to finish cancelling? Mildly sure.
Maybe Katana is somewhere with stronger consumer-protection laws than the USA. It’s not possible to make judgements about legal/illegal without at least knowing the jurisdiction.
We can say for sure that it’s obnoxious and unethical.
I mean, it’s definitely possible in this case because it’s a gym with locations in the US only.
Sssh, no reasonable responses here - we’re here for outrage
/s
What were the terms of the contract?
You did read the contract right?
I don’t know that even matters much, most of these contracts tend to have a clause they can change the contract at anytime and they may or may not notify you.
Those clauses are unenforceable 99% of the time and nullify that version, and all future versions, of the contract. The only clauses like that that are considered enforceable are ones that cover very minor changes or those required due to changes in law.
Yeah it sucks
Anyway I think they are legally required to notify you but I’m not a legal professional. If they are required they probably sent out a single email that was designed to look like spam.
I don’t blame people for being upset because gyms are disgusting money grubbers but it doesn’t invalidate their own responsibility to not enter into bullshit contracts.
I get where you’re coming from so I won’t downvote, but I thought you might want to know that this has some real “men shouldn’t rape women, but women shouldn’t dress slutty or get drunk” or “police shouldn’t shoot black men, but black men should just comply” vibes.
What?
How is this in any way related to rape? Being raped is horrible and should not be compared to being locked in a dumb contract.
Didn’t think I had to spell this out, but in all three cases it’s victim blaming. Men blaming women for being raped, white people blaming black people for being shot by the police, and the previous poster blaming people for getting caught in shitty contracts by predatory companies. On a scale of severity they’re in completely different universes, but that’s kind of the point of an analogy: to use a more extreme example to illustrate why something is wrong.
Edit: And to be clear, this comment was not addressed at your comment, but the poster who replied to you.
Very wild take.
In the gym-case you actively have to sign a contract that has a defined duration. You know all the terms of that contract or at least you agree to all the terms with your signature.
You don’t passively “get caught in” a gym-contract. People might sign those without reasing, but that doesn’t make them victims.
What the fuck are you talking about? I couldn’t care less what “vibes” your crazy ass is feeling.
Presumably you had some point that you were trying to convey with your comment, which is going to get lost by the people who will see it as simply victim blaming. The tone of this reply and your other comments suggest that you’re fine having an abrasive personality and care more about some sense of being right than constructive criticism, so I’ll just leave it there and wish you a good day!
Presumably you’re fucking batshit
No idea how it works where you are but in Belgium and in the EU we have https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ombudsman which according to https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ombudsman_services_by_country is available in most places. Anyway I can tell you when companies receive an email from them, they don’t mess around. I’ve been waiting for a bike part for a year. I contacted the ombudsman, no cost, just 2 emails, suddenly my carbon belt was shipping the very next day.
This is the US, and Trump’s US, so it’s all hell there.
My bank immediately referred themselves to the financial ombudsman (UK) when they realised they’d been charging me for an account they weren’t supposed to be, which I was very mildly impressed by.
In the us, in most places, things are much different than that. There aren’t as many protections for the consumer and even fewer with the current administration taking an axe to things that were enacted during the previous administration.
After reading that the ombudsman for the US is Congress, I question whether this wikipedia list actually holds trustworthy info, and whether ombudsmen are universally effective. Congress do not strike me as effective resolvers of anything.
The Wikipedia list is trustworthy, even if the US Congress is not.
So ombudsman can be for “petty” things, like the belt of my e-bike, but also for much more “serious” things like political corruption, vote scams, etc where I imagine Congress might be correct. As https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ombudsmen_in_the_United_States clarifies though there are ombudsmen dedicated to agencies but also state level or even city and county level. So I imagine the more precise you are picking the right one, the more likely it’s going to be treated, efficiently or at all.
Hello Congress, I’d like to report that you are corrupt. Plz fix. K thanks bye.
I thought I heard that California had a law requiring cancelling be just as easy as signing up? Is that not the case? (Assuming the name of the gym is an indicator of the city it’s based in, and not the state or country.)
This is true but checking their website shows locations outside of California which could be the case here
A subscription fee to not do anything, what a bunch of criminals. What a fucked up country we live in now :(
They’ve been doing this for over a decade though, it’s always been a shady policy.
What a fucked up
countryworld we live in now
I once tried to quit a Union in my place of employment figuring I could protect and take care of myself and because my union guy was this arrogant dick. Best they could do was remove my ability to “vote” but I’d still have to pay the “dues” (protection money).
Amazing thing about unions, everyone complains about leadership yet no one votes. As a Union man I have no sympathy.
How does that work? Are they saying you are forced to pay? Would they sue you if you just stopped paying?
Automatically deducted from my pay.
You wanted the perks of the union but didn’t want to pay the dues. Got it.
Perks?
If you work in a union shop you benefit from the union contract, with wages, healthcare etc etc. Union workers earn roughly 10–15% more than similar non‑union workers on average. You working at that place, you are getting the benefits/wages the union fought for.
I’m all for unions but they should not be forced.
I am all for unions, but union jobs have a union for a fucking reason. I’d rather not work for an employer that is or was so hostile that the employees needed to rise up.
I’d rather not work for an employer that is or was so hostile that the employees needed to rise up
That sounds horrible. I have never seen nor heard about a situation like that (in a legal setting, illegal work conditions are another matter). I am also not from the USA (which I assume OP), so my perspective is perhaps different.
Joining a union is never forced where I live, and you can join a union without your work having an agreement with one (they will give legal aid, probably more, and try to improve all workers’ rights. A lot of benefits I enjoy today is because someone else took the fight before me).
