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.
