The Lockwood Letter

A few days ago I heard an ad on the radio for a gym, claiming “join by the end of April and pay no enrollment fee, no long-term contract, month-to-month.”

So I stopped by there today to get the details. Since the ad claimed there was no fee to sign up (based on my understanding of the English language), I had a simple question for them: what exactly is the offer? There should just be a monthly fee, so how much is it?

That should be a 30-second answer, but I had to sign in and go through the drill. I told them I didn’t need a tour, just needed to know the terms of the offer, since I was ready to join right away.

Surprise, surprise, the “no enrollment fee” offer only applies to the long-term contract membership with a much higher monthly fee.

In other words, the terms they claimed in their ad were not all part of the same deal, i.e., false advertising. Sort of like an “all-you-can-eat” restaurant that limits you to one plate of food.

The deal turned out to be $29 enrollment fee plus $40 per month. OK, it wasn’t exactly what their ad claimed, but I thought I’d cut them some slack. I was ready to sign up.

The guy took my address and phone, and I was just about to hand over my credit card, when I saw that the bill for today was over $140.

Must be the new math, because to me it should have been $29 plus $40 plus tax, which would make it around $75, give or take a buck.

Turns out $20 of that was the “processing fee”, to make my membership card, etc. (It’s not like those little plastic cards can be made for $1, and we all know how expensive it is to add one more person to a computer database these days.)

It’s funny- I thought the $29 should cover that stuff. Isn’t that what the enrollment fee is for? The enrollment fee that their ad lied about me not having to pay?

I can use a thesaurus, too. They can call it an enrollment fee, initiation fee, joining fee, processing fee… the point is, what does it cost to join, other than the monthly fees?

It gets even better… they also had $40 in there for the last month’s fee. I said why do you expect me to pay that in advance? That’s not what “month to month” means.

The reply was that when I cancel, I would be able to use the gym for another 60 days, because they would give me a free month. Lucky me!

So I said if I canceled, it would be because I was moving away, so that 60 days would be wasted, since I probably wouldn’t know that 60 days in advance.

The guy disappeared so he could talk to some manager or whatever about that, then came back trying to explain it to me, so I just said he told me $29 to join and $40 a month, so I wasn’t about to pay double that today.

Then I walked out.

Pretty stupid on their part, I think. They just threw away $40 a month, and me being there 3 days a week would have cost them virtually nil, so that’s all profit they are giving up. How much did they spend on that radio ad?

Sadly, this kind of nonsense is the norm for lots of offline businesses such as gyms, car dealers, airlines, hotels, cable TV companies, cell phone carriers…

The hotel room is $99 per night, then you find out about the $10 resort fee and the $5 energy fee. In other words it’s really $114 a night, but we lied to make it sound cheaper than the other hotels.

Yet I see people getting bent out of shape about some Internet marketing tactics that are nowhere near the blatant false advertising I just described here. Like exit popups, for crying out loud!

Or they get upset because someone whose list they double opted into dared to send them an email that they could have easily unsubscribed from.

Or they don’t like an ebook, so they call the guy who sold it a scammer, even though they can get a refund and keep the product.
Who’s scamming who?

Imagine if I said my new report is free, but there is a $19 downloading fee plus a $20 bandwidth fee… you’d call that BS, right?

Or imagine if I said my new membership site is $40 a month, but it will cost you $100 extra when you sign up, because of the enrollment fee, processing fee, and last month’s membership fee… you’d probably run away, even if I said you’d still be able to login for 60 days after you cancel. Huh?

But at least you wouldn’t have to drive somewhere on $3.65 gas and sit with someone for 15 minutes just to find out how bad they were going to try to rip you off.

So if people are going to get their knickers in a bunch over something they don’t like online, why do they put up with all the offline ripoffs and false advertising?