I'm writing this to advise people of what can be politely termed unethical business practices or more commonly known as a legal scam. When I went in to Good Life Fitness to cancel my membership on the eve of my 1 year term expiration (actually it turns out to be an automatic renewal) I was hosted to a well orchestrated "membership retention" sales pitch. The Gentlemen was very nice and understanding and offered me another month of membership for only $5.00 to reconsider our cancellation request. I signed the papers - my first mistake. After all, it was only $5.00 for another month right? WRONG!
After 3 months a routine check of my bank account balances found that in the month following our $5.00 reconsideration month Good Life automatically renewed my membership and commenced automatic fund withdrawals of $17.95 every two weeks! Not following up after the %5.00 month was my second mistake.
Subsequently I called our local Good Life rep who (almost in a rehearsed manner) understood my complaint but could not do anything except to pass me along to the Good Life Head office 1-800 number stating that all "paperwork" is passed on to head office for administration -- they would help me. The answering Good Life agent was able to efficiently call up my signed paperwork on the computer. Evidently, despite our very clear wishes to terminate our membership with Good Life it became apparent that since I did not follow-up and re-affirm my strong desire to terminate my membership the membership was automatically renewed. I have no doubt that this is legal of course -- we DID sign the papers! It is also a deceptive and questionable (to say the least) business practice. Good Life took me for about another $100 before I noticed what was happening. Shame on me for not recognizing this legal scam sooner and SHAME on them for their now obvious and deliberate business practices to extract more money using such auto-renewal practices. Just because it is legal it does not make it ethical or proper and both perspective and current members should be aware of this slimy scam. Hopefully by publicized this legal scam I will save numerous others aggravation and money.
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