FTC announces "click-to-cancel" rule making it easier to cancel subscriptions

I wonder how this would work for gyms?

They should clean up their act anyway. If other customers are like me I’ve been putting off joining for over a year because they’re so scammy and I don’t want to get locked in.

I even went to sign up and walked out because the price ended up being double what they advertised with weird fees and the base plan not being useable once they explain it.

Conversely there is a gym in my town that was a month to month subscription with moments notice cancellation. They'd even pro-rate your remaining time back to you. I ended up joining and cancelling those gyms a lot through college years, but I'm much more willing to rejoin if it was easy to cancel.

I recommend asking your neighborhood/city subreddit for gyms that aren't awful when cancelling

I just had the pleasure of a one email cancellation with my gym after moving

If you setup a "payment agreement" between yourself, the gym (or any similar service), and your credit card, you should be able to cancel that agreement and the subsequent services that agreement entailed through your credit card. The byzantine and manipulative things that gyms do are, in part, because we basically let them control the cancellation process.

If you can sign up for the gym online, then you need to be able to cancel online. That's how this rule is meant to work for all kinds of merchants. Gyms would still be free to pull their usual car-salesman shenanigans on cancellation if they're willing to only take new subscriptions on location and not online, too.

That's why the only gyms I've signed up for have been YMCAs, because I know I can cancel my membership there without hassle.

Where did you get this notion from? The FTC was founded in 1914 and has broad authority over trade and consumer services of all kinds.

None of the LA Fitness gyms let you cancel online, I’ve reported them but nothing happens. This was about ~3 years ago, maybe they changed it now.

I cancelled my membership at 24 Hours Fitness back in the early 2000s. They informed me that because of how their system works it can take a few weeks to process the cancelation and I will get charged for another month. This is such BS and obviously a scam. When the charge appeared on my credit card, I just disputed it with evidence of cancelation and that was that.

How does that work: you just tell them you renounce Jesus Christ?

I think that's the FCC, not FTC.

I was wondering this too.

LA Fitness wanted me to mail something to their headquarters, which was intentionally onerous. I filed a complaint with BBB and cc'd LA Fitness on them, and they ended up cancelling it for me.

Still, I did originally sign up for the gym in person, so I wonder if they'd be allowed to force the person to come back in person to cancel. This still seems like too much work, especially for when people move.

It may be different now, but Planet Fitness used to ONLY allow you to set up ACH payments (e.g. bank routing and account number) and then only allow you to cancel in person. You can't dispute because it's ACH.

Gyms are so damn scummy with this. When I cancelled my last gym membership due to moving I had to show them that there would be no nearby gyms of that brand where I was moving in order to let me cancel.

It's the same now, but actually worse. For me I had to mail-in a cancellation request. They can't cancel it at my gym.

Sorry that's probably because I used the moving excuse very often when I was younger to get them to shut up.

I agree. In Australia we have much better banking than the US (instant free transfers between all banks), but you still can't cancel a recurring payment thru your bank like that. I had trouble cancelling a gym earlier this year.

When I lived in the UK and I wanted to cancel my gym, not only can you cancel the recurring payment thru your bank app, but the gym's website said that's how you should cancel.

Planet Fitness makes it easy to sign up online but you will have to journey to the to the ends of the Earth to cancel your subscription.

I asked about cancellation policies before joining and when I found out about the mail in cancellation policy I literally laughed in their faces and walked out. It's obvious abuse.

print off the form, get it notarized, sprinkle it with essence of rose, put your signature, thumbprint, and a skin sample to prove your identity, sing songs to the machine god to empower its cancellation abilities, send through registered mail to an address antarctica, and follow up with form 2 and a similar process within one month.