NYC Gym Memberships = Pain in the Ass

You know... do gyms have to make it so hard to get even the slightest amount of information? I called NYSC's central membership line to try to make a change to my membership. I'd signed up while I lived in Manhattan, so my "home club" is the on East 34th near where I lived a few years ago. The rate play that I currently have costs me $82.45/month and I can use any club at any time. It was an appealing feature to have at that point because I wanted to be able to use both the club near my apartment and the one near school and I kept pretty odd hours during the first year of law school, so that's what I signed up for.

Now, at this point, I'm basically only using the club near my place in Brooklyn, and occasionally the one near my parents' house in NJ. So what I wanted to do is change my "home club" to the one near me, and then change to a rate plan that allows me to use the home club at any time, and other clubs only during off-peak hours (weekdays during the day except during lunch hour, weekday evenings after 8:30, and weekends). First thing I did was look at the website, but you can't make that kind of change online. So I got the phone numbers off the website for their central membership line (because it says "Sports Clubs Member Services Department administers customer accounts from a centralized call center") and my local club. I called the 800 line for the centralized call center, waited on hold for about 25 minutes, and was told that I couldn't make those changes with the call center; I had to speak to my local club. You know, if you're going to make people wait on hold for that long, you should at least be able to handle their inquiries. And not, you know, misleadingly tell them to use that call line on your website.

So then I called my local club, and was able to speak to someone in the membership department with a minimum of delay. When I told the nice woman that I wanted to change my home club, though, she told me that there was a $40 fee to do so.

*pause*

"What?" I asked. So, to make a change to my membership that would basically be a minor change to my computer entry, and would result in no change to my usage habits or my billing plan, and you want to charge me half of my monthly fee? That just makes no sense.

So after that I explained that I was on their "passport" plan (as described above) and that I wanted to change to their "gold" plan. She told me that A) I would also be charged a $40 fee for that change, and B) the difference would only be about $3 per month. I didn't really have the patience to attempt to negotiate a lower fee, so I thanked for her time and then hung up.

Afterwards I went online to look into other gyms in my area. They almost never have their rates on their websites. I think that's because they want to get you to come in to their locations so they can give you the hard sell. And, as it turns out, from info courtesy of Gothamist, what I'm paying basically is the going rate for a multiple-location gym (NYSC, Crunch, Equinox, etc.) in New York. It's just a lot of money and that's the way it is, like everything else here.

Says a lot that my customer service experience with Time Warner Cable was far, far more pleasant.

This was all brought on by some stuff earlier in the day that I'll maybe write more about later, if I'm feeling up to it.