The article left me wondering if Planet Fitness was in the right business. Gyms are for exercise, complete with sweating and grunting. I agree that no one wants to be around that tool on the treadmill shouting, "Wooo" every few moments, but a 'no grunting' policy is taking it way too far.
The other issue this brings up for me is the 'business conspiracy'. Planet Fitness might be on exactly the right track here for manipulating the market for maximum profit. If you own one of these gyms, you don't really want to sell your memberships to serious weight-lifters who are going to come in everyday and use the gym for 1-2 hours at a time. If you were to sell 50 memberships to serious lifters, the gym would be pretty heavily used and always appear relatively busy. Better then to sell 200 memberships to occasional, recreational lifters. These folks might come in 1-2 times per week, for 20-30 minutes. Your business is immediately 4x more profitable, and not looking too busy or full allows you to keep selling memberships to any new client who walks through the door.
I'd be interested to know if the Planet Fitness severed the membership contract of the offending lifter, Mr. Argibay. Or whether they tried to retain some or all of his payment(s). Gyms I've dealt with have been notoriously underhanded about contracts and trying to keep members paying. For instance, my wife and pre-paid for a 6 month membership at Gold's Gym, then went to a month to month with no contract after that time. We moved out of the city, and I went to cancel the membership since we weren't living near enough to use the gym. 3 weeks running around and a dozen phone calls later, I was faxed a copy of a 12 month contract where a sales-rep at Gold's had forged my signature. I had to escalate up and up the management track. I eventually got a VP at headquarters to cancel my fake contract (still no admission of wrongdoing) only as a 'favor' to me and because my month-to-month fee was "really low and most members would be happy to pay that rate". Fucktards. Not that I'm bitter about or anything.
