iStockphoto / Drazen Zigic
A recent story about a man in Ohio forced to go to extreme lengths in order to cancel his gym membership underscores just how necessary a new rule recently passed by the FTC is.
59-year-old Doug Mattison’s story was recently featured by Inside News Hub and has since gained a lot of attention because millions of Americans, myself included, have jumped through similar hoops and been trapped in Kafkaesque nightmares trying to cancel gym memberships in particular.
For Doug Mattison, he was finally able to cancel his gym membership only after getting his bank involved and cutting things off at the source. But it started with Mattison contact the gym and saying he wanted to cancel. They told him they couldn’t cancel the membership over the phone or online and it had to be in person.
So he went down there and the people at the gym told him they were unable to cancel the membership, saying they did not “have the ability to stop it or do anything on it” and only the gym’s parent company had the authority to cancel his membership.
From there, he contacted the gym’s parent company whose customer service representatives said they were unable to cancel the Mattison’s membership over the phone. They also didn’t offer him any other way to cancel it, in-person or online.
Frustrated, the 59-year-old went to his bank and complained. At the bank he learned that this is an all-too-common issue customers deal with. The bank’s solution was to simply cancel the credit card which is used to withdraw money because at this point the gym was still charging him monthly despite him going to extreme lengths to cancel the membership.
Mattison’s bank also told him that he was fortunate to have been using a credit card versus bank account for direct deposit. According to Inside News Hub, Doug said the bank told him it was “good news was that I only gave them a card number instead of my actual account number. Then it’s a lot more hassle.”
This all underscores the importance of a new rule adopted by the Federal Trade Commission last week, in a vote of 3-2, that will make it as easy for customers to unsubscribe as it was for them to subscribe in the first place. It specifically applies to gym memberships, streaming video services, and other similar online subscriptions that are notoriously complicated and difficult to unsubscribe from.
The FTC’s new rule is similar to one passed in California recently by Governor Gavin Newsom. Newsom’s ‘Click to Cancel’ law was signed last month and the FTC’s new rule came shortly after.
The LA Times has a great explainer on the new FTC rule for those interested but the gist of it is we, as consumers, will no longer be trapped by gyms and online subscriptions when trying to unsubscribe. And if the companies using these deceptive practices don’t make it as easy to unsubscribe as they did to subscribe they will face harsh penalties.