I under­stand that the tactic they use - which I shall explain- is a common one, but that in no way makes it right. By doing what they are doing, they are negat­ing all of the good user expe­ri­ence I had while I was using their facilities.

They won’t let me leave

well that’s not entirely true…

They are making it impressively inconvenient for me leave

Bril­liant strat­egy of you’ve got some­one by the credit card, but it’s a hor­ri­ble move. Try to follow my logic on this one, and feel free to com­ment on whether I’m an invalid or not.

When I signed up, I wasn’t pressured

They showed me around, answered all my ques­tions, and then told me I could come back any­time if I was inter­ested in sign­ing up. I ended up sign­ing up that day, as I liked what I saw and liked the staff. It far sur­passed any of the other gyms I had looked at, and I was happy to join with them.

I signed some papers, wrote off my soul, etc. etc.. Every­thing was par for the course.

I used the facilities, and I liked them

Things were clean and main­tained. The patrons were nice, fol­lowed the rules, and gen­er­ally got along. I never had a com­plaint, though I did over­hear one of a lady being upset that another lady was wear­ing a belly top of sorts (this was against the dress code.)

Oh yeah, I forgot to men­tion that they had a respectable dress code. No scant­ily clad women or men. This was a place for work­ing out, not gawking.

I got lazy, and stopped going

Yup, all me. I got lazy, fell out of prac­tice, and even­tu­ally stopped going. I was still paying for the gym though, despite my never going. That’s no ones fault but my own. I was under a con­tract with them and I had to wait a while before I could quit.

I finally got around to quitting, or so I thought

I walked into the gym that faith­ful day, and told them that I wanted to cancel my mem­ber­ship. “No problem,” said the help­ful desk girl, “Just mail this paper with your email on it to the head office. They will then send you an email con­fir­ma­tion and you can cancel.”

Wait, what? Mail? You mean that thing with the paper and the stamps and the envelopes? That thing you do with Santa? Seriously?

Seri­ously.

Well, that’s ridicu­lous. I’m sure I can just go online or some­thing to do this. They had a way to sign up for an account, so there should be a way to cancel it in the same area right?

Wrong.

This is where things went down hill for me. I cre­ated an account (which required a phone call as some of my inter­nal data was miss­ing, caus­ing the val­i­da­tion to fail), and looked around for a ‘Stop Payment’ or ‘Cancel Account’ or some­thing. There was no link to be clicked, no button to be pressed, no email to be sent. The only way to cancel your account was to mail in a paper, which you could print from the web­site, to their home office on California.

What’s wrong with this picture?

They did such a good job of nab­bing me, of keep­ing me happy and con­tent, of making sure my opin­ion of them was that of ’sunshine from the butt’ pro­por­tions. Why would they drop me on my ass when I want to leave? Now all the good things they did for me are for­got­ten, and all I can say is what a bitch it is to cancel my membership.

Lesson: don’t burn bridges

They have, whether inten­tion­ally or not, burned a bridge with me. Not only do I want to cancel my account with them (I’m work­ing on it, I promise) but now I want to tell every­one about how much of an ordeal it is to cancel said account. I’m not going to say how won­der­ful their places are, or how con­sid­er­ate their staff may be; I’m going to remem­ber the fresh­est expe­ri­ence first: dropped on my ass.

If you’re going to try and screw people out of money, fine. I can’t stop you, because that’s just how a lot of busi­nesses oper­ate and I’m not one to com­ment on that. I’ll leave the busi­ness com­men­tary to those who know what they’re talk­ing about. What I’m trying to get across is a simple usabil­ity exer­cise: If you make every­thing from start to finish as simple and easy as pos­si­ble, that’s what I will tell people.

Had the gym made it simple to cancel my account, they may have lost out on my 40 dol­lars a month. They would have also gained a person who would spout out their great­ness to anyone will­ing to listen. I liked that gym, but I will no longer rec­om­mend them for this reason.

To sum­ma­rize: Be nice from start to finish. Even when people are leav­ing you, wave them good­bye, don’t slam the door on their ass on the way out. Those people have mouths.

Bonus Lesson: Have a point of contact

If you visit their web­site, you’ll find that the only way to con­tact them is via a non-800 phone number, within set hours. No email, no con­tact form. What’s the point of a web­site with online user reg­is­tra­tion, when you can’t even email the company?