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this post was submitted on 07 Oct 2024
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chapotraphouse
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It’s so absurd how cancelling a gym membership has becoming a universal trope for a binding contract.
I’m going through this now and I want to burger the entire gym
the existence of people complaining about them is what has made me very severe in avoiding giving any organization I do business with auto draft privileges.
but recently, I had an in issue where some org I really believed in and had authorized for auto draft could not seem to acknowledge I was leaving the specific employer + entire region and need to cancel my membership. I spent months emailing and calling, total radio silence, no one I got ahold of could help me.
that's when I found out that I could send a piece of paper with some basic info and two sentences to the business office of my credit union, permanently revoking my authorization for that specific organization to draft on my account. worked like a fucking charm.
I am pretty sure the entire gym membership model is organized around how weird and obscure the ACH authorization process is.
Yeah I only ever had one gym membership, which I "cancelled" by ditching the bank account the debit card I gave them was tied to. So they called me up and said, hey, your card was declined, so you need to give us another card number. And I said, oh really? Because I think I'm going to cancel my membership right now. And she said, no, you can't do that, you have to go through our process for that. And I said, oh yeah? And what leverage do you have to make me do that, exactly? And then I hung up on her.
I tried doing that and the fuckers sent my account to a collections agency that hounded me nonstop for months and damaged my credit score. All over like $40 they refused to drop because my written cancellation was submitted by my ex to cancel both of our memberships rather than me personally submitting it
If you have insurance in the US, look into Active and Fit Direct.
It lets you into a network of local gyms on a subscription model with a flat rate. It’s billed by your insurance, so when you want to cancel, you just ask your insurance. You never have to interface with the gym at all for billing matters.
I never personally used it since I moved away, but did look into it and heard good things.