24-Hour Financial Fitness

So far so good with the cat allergies. It’s been a week, and I haven’t had any symptoms. Hopefully this will continue. Incidentally, Lucy is less of a jerk than I remember. I think she’s happy in our new house, what with the front patio and highly perched window views throughout the house.

I’ve been spending some time at 24 Hour Fitness in Hillcrest. I like the yoga classes there. They are sardine packed with Hillcrest’s flexible elite, but the good instructors and rather fast paced (for yoga) classes keep me coming back. That being said, I despise 24 Hour Fitness due to their business model, which squeezes out as much profit as possible with the following cost-saving tactics:

- Sell as many subscriptions as possible, do not consider gym overcrowding
- Hire flabby, out-of-shape fitness instructors who charge patrons by the hour to walk around the gym with them
- Hire muscular “instructors” whose job is really hard-selling new memberships
- Intersperse the music pumping throughout the gym with advertisements for costly 24 hour fitness extras or friend signup programs.

Basically, it is painfully obvious that the gym’s focus is on making money, not getting people in shape. A gym should make money, but should do a better job hiding its desire to make money. For such a well oiled machine, I’m surprised by the inefficiency of their intercom paging. They have a company-mandated way of paging their instructors, which is the same every time (I wish I could ignore it): “Attention all 24 Hour Fitness Staff, Mike please come to the front desk.” Why alert all the staff when you only want Mike’s attention? How about: “Attention instructor Mike.” You never hear a hospital intercom say: “Attention all Cedar Sinai medical doctors, will Doctor Jones please come to the ER.” I figure tidying up the company policy on paging could save the company $200 a year, which would be enough to repair the stair steppers that keep missing their chains and plummeting me and other riders to the floor.