If they listed their prices on their website, no one would ever join.
This is probably true.
Also, my gym requires a 12 month sign-up. You can pay monthly or all upfront, but you're stuck with 12 months. Last night my woman was saying, "they should stop signing up new people, it's crowded sometimes already."
I replied, "yeah but lots of people come a few times and then drop out, so long as they don't sign up more people than drop out, it won't get worse."
"Surely not that many people drop out?"
"I don't know - but they make us sign up for 12 months, if everyone who signed up came regularly they wouldn't need to do that, they could just charge us $3 each time we came or something."
I've always said with mobile phone plans and the like, "if they make you sign up for a year or two, they're not confident you'll want to stick with them so their service can't be that good" - but it's a bit different with gyms. That's because whether you stay or go has got less to do with the service and more to do with whether you can be arsed with it
So I look at the cost of the thing in those terms. If I pay $30 a month but then never go, that's a waste of money; if I pay $100 a month and turn uber-buff, well it was probably worth it!
Bree, as a former gym salesperson, perhaps you could start a thread talking about people starting and dropping out or sticking with it, we could discuss what sorts of stuff makes people stick with it? Because really that's the number one thing that gets results - actually doing
something...