Fuck you, Equinox

I usually quietly stop patronizing a business whose politics mortally offend me (but I’m not quiet about shunning a business for appallingly shitty customer service, Best Buy and Dick’s Sporting Goods). While the MAGA ilk furiously destroys its perfectly good Keurig appliances and buys new Nike shoes to burn in sad little YouTube videos, I’ve never destroyed anything for any reason if I could instead give it to someone who might truly need it.

But here’s a loophole.

I went to Equinox gym in the Chicago loop faithfully for seven years. It was expensive as hell, but it was right next to a train line and three blocks from my office and while I was driving myself into abject poverty to look pretty I also hired their most expensive trainer to regularly kick my butt to the point of dry-heaving in the gorgeously appointed showers afterward. And I liked it!

But they were skeevy, lying, borderline cruel dicks to me when I moved home TO BE HOSPITALIZED IN A PSYCH WARD and understandably didn’t have canceling my gym membership high on my list of things to think about before I left town. Every time I called to cancel I got 1) a freakishly long wait time while someone went “to find a manager” and 2) a completely conflicting story by each manager du jour: I had to drive to Chicago to cancel in person, I could fax in a form that they never mailed to me, nobody could have possibly told me I could fax in a form because they don’t even have a fax machine, I could have a friend cancel in person for me if I mailed them a copy of the Illinois driver’s license that I’d forfeited when I got my Iowa one ... all of which was beyond the normal dick-around you get when you try to cancel a gym membership. It literally cost me over $1,000 in auto-pay membership fees (that protesting to my credit card AND EVEN CHANGING MY CREDIT CARD NUMBER couldn’t end) before I called the police and suddenly Equinox located that long-lost competent manager who canceled my membership easy-peasy on the spot, right over the phone.

Fuck you, Equinox.

I recently found the Equinox T-shirt that I was given as a new member. It was shittily made with a collar that was so high in the front that I always felt like I had it on backward, it had been languishing at the bottom of a box in my storage unit until very recently, and I actually thought I’d put it directly in a long-gone giveaway pile when I rediscovered it.

But I just found it again this morning, in the days after mass protests and cancellations have erupted after the discovery that billionaire Stephen Ross, founder of the Equinox/Soulcycle parent company, was hosting a massive trump fundraiser.

So in the wake of Equinox’s 1) shitty longtime-member customer service, 2) shitty owner’s shitty political ties and 3) shitty-fitting member T-shirt, I now have an expensive new set of painting rags. And a list of painting projects that are just SURE to be messy.

Fuck you, Equinox. (Or did I already say that?)