My 15 month gym membership is nearly up and I'm coming to this cross road where I have no idea if I'm going to continue to pay the $55 bucks a month to belong to a gym that treats it's members (and I mean, the core members, the people who actually come to the gym to workout) like crap.
Last night, as my wife and I were heading in for our typical Friday night workout, we were met with this shotgun blast of disgusting and gross behavior, just running amok around the gym facilities:
Children. Hordes of children. And balloons.
'Tweens (children not exactly in their teens, but older and bigger than most elementary school kids) were running around, crashing into things and people, dancing to the Black Eyed Peas, ... everything you could imagine from a Robin Williams movie from the mid-1990s. Obviously, to a young couple with zero desire to have children, this was very off-putting.
"You know when you have those feelings when you get in the front door, and immediately don't want to do your workout?" I ask my wife over the din as we cautiously make our way to the front desk to check in. She's notorious for getting all the way out to the gym, in the doors, only to want to turn back because she doesn't feel like working out.
"You're having one of those moments, huh?" She says back. I nod.
We wait at the front desk for an employee to "beep" us in with our membership fobs, but no one's paying any attention to us. There's one employee way off to the side having some sort of deep conversation with a parent who's just ... caught up in this whole whirlwind of screaming pre-adolescence. The poor woman looks shell shocked; a victim of some sort of terrorist market bombing.
Eventually, after leaving enough time for someone to notice us, I said "fuck it" and swiped our cards for us. We grabbed towels (we were going to TRY to swim...) and made our way downstairs to the gym proper, while avoiding more balloons and sugar-high kids.
"But seriously, let's get out of here," I try again, as making our way down the stairs becomes an effort; the stairway is clogged with loitering, unsupervised children. We're able to look into the pool area and we see it's awash in splashing kids. No laps for us tonight.
We honestly thought there'd be no way kids would be allowed to run amok downstairs in the actual gym area, but we were wrong. Tubby kids in the pilates room throwing swiss balls at each other like over-sized dodge balls, children running at full speed across the gym floor, one of the racket ball courts converted into a giant inflatable bouncehaus. A few hearty (and presumably single) souls were trying to tough it out, and try to workout despite the constant distractions, but you could tell they weren't enjoying themselves. They were annoyed; one guy just sat on a bench with a numb expression on his face, earbuds in, watching children climb all over the ellipticals.
We about-faced and tossed our towels on to a nearby desk, like "fuck it." We weaved back thru the crowds of ungrateful brats and stunned proctors. No one seemed to notice that we were leaving within five minutes of arriving.
Last night wouldn't have bothered me so much if there had been at least a 24 hour heads up, some sort of printed-off notice that said "hey, on Friday night, we're hosting a middle school dance and function, you might not want to be here for it, thanks, the Willy's staff." Something like that, printed out and taped to the wall over the water fountain would've sufficed. Nothing crazy, no mass emails, no phone calls, nothing. Just a simple white sheet of paper with those words on it.
It took me less than ten seconds to type that sentence out. Printing might've taken all of 30. Taping on to a surface within a high-traffic area, maybe a minute. Seriously.
But no heads up was given. Literally, we were blindsided by this turn of events. Did the Willy's staff really think for a second people, due-paying members, would want to workout in this type of environment? How bad is this facility hemorrhaging money to rent out the whole establishment on a Friday night (see also: failed restaurant-in-the-middle-of-winter-on-Cape idea)?
To make matters worse, the management at Willy's (in Eastham, MA by the way.....) has been stacking it's reviews on the business web aggregate site "Yelp" recently. By "stacking" the reviews, I mean, hiring people who may have never stepped into the facility to write bogus glowing reviews in an attempt to raise the business's web clout. You see, Google ranks it's search listings for businesses based off of reviews from sites like Yelp, TripAdvisor, etc. The better the overall reviews, the more frequent and more towards the top of the search pile the business will appear.
For over a year, there had only been three reviews for Willy's Gym, the best was a 4/5 star rating from some gay dude out on San Fran. The other two (one being mine) were mediocre. Suddenly last week, a slew of ultra-positive, rather vague reviews from Oregon of all places, started to pop up on Willy's Yelp site (not to mention "new" Yelp pages, stacked with positive reviews, to help off set the original site listing's less-than-stellar rating). The reviews are pretty much identical, from people whom have reviewed no other businesses on the site, and have no real profiles.
Thus, a rather unethical practice, attempting to dope the casual summer tourist into thinking Willy's Gym is worth the 20 dollar day pass.
I can only hope that people will be able to see thru the bullshit.
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