Racism is as Racism does.

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Dear Debbie,

In ref: to your letter of September 14^th.

First of all, please let me say thank you for the contract cancellation acknowledgement and the promptness of your response.

There are countless accounts on the internet of this not being forthcoming and membership to the gym being continued regardless of cancellation letter, so I was pleased to find this not the case.

However I was still more than a little perplexed by the nature of your response. And as I am until the end of October, still a paying customer (or hostage as I have come to call it) I feel compelled to respond.

In your letter you have sent me a photo copy of my contract explaining the 10 day cooling off period and how the membership cancellation process works and that it is in the contract.

I did not dispute this.

My complaint was that I was lied to by staff at the point of sale, something that you seem spectacularly unimpressed by. I enclose a photo copy of the conversation that will display how I was cajoled into a position where I did not feel the need to go through the contract with a fine tooth comb to ensure that I was not being duped into a position where I would need to pay for 2 months membership that I had no need whatsoever for, (or I would have enclosed it if it was empirically possible to do so).

I also highlighted that Fitness First do not HAVE to hold customers to the contractual letter of the law. I was implying that whilst I would see the September payment as something that Fitness First should expect to collect in the circumstances, the fact that I requested the cancellation of the October payment only a day or two late, one would think, given the total lack of impact on the Fitness First institution, that they would see that their staff had behaved inappropriately at the point of sale and consider making a concession.

The majestic nature of the concession would have resulted in a placated customer who now understood the contracts cancellation policy in full and could re-join the gym fully informed when it was next possible to attend, as was my initial goal.

You however decided to respond to the more inflammatory remarks in my letter by accusing them of being ‘tantamount to racism’. This to my ear, is a spectacularly ill considered statement.

My statements were deliberately absurd in order to stress just how ugly I consider the manner in which Fitness First has dealt with my complaint. It seems to me that I have met with behaviour that can be directly analogised with facist policing techniques, and I used an extended analogy to imply that to have staff as belligerent and aggressively jobsworth as the ones I have encountered, that you must have to put them through some humanity devolving tasks to find them.

Wherein lies the racism I ask you?

Please retract the statement or explain it, I am happy with either.

At present your suggestion that your paying customer is a racist for suggesting that you employ Nazi’s seems to me only to be racist if:

a)      All Fitness First staff are German

b)      All Fitness First staff are generally assumed to be Germans by common perception

c)      You are a German

If any of these are the case, then please accept my formal apologies as I do not consider the German nation to have Nazi inclination, but I DO consider the methods and behaviour of Fitness First to have similarities in approach to complaint.

Otherwise, I do not consider your previous letter a tackling of the complaint issues that I have raised, though once again, thank you for the cancellation acknowledgement.

Please tell me in what context my remarks are racist, as I am currently under the impression that you, without cause, have sent a paying customer a letter calling them a racist……….

Yours truly,

Alex Lewis.

Response Letter typed out

Dear Alex

I am writing in response to your letter recieved 07.09.2009

Please accept my apolgies that you were under the impression your membership automatically cancelled after the initial three month period. I have enclosed a copy of your contract to which you signed for your information.

We give all members a 10 day cooling off period to which members can read and ingest the terms and conditions of their signed contract. If during that period members are unhappy with the membership they have the option of cancelling within these ten days. Clearly had you taken advantage of this you would have not only been aware that the contract was a rolling contract but if you were in disagreement you could have subsequently cancelled the contract.

I am appalled at your comments in your letter and your comparison with Fitness First staff to Nazi's is tantamount to racism. Not to mention your further references to African villagers or the disabled. It is the members responsibility to ensure that they read the contracts terms and conditions ans, as already mentioned the option to cancel is available in the first ten days of the membership.

This letter is confirmation that your account with Fitness First will be cancelled from the end of Oct 2009 and no further payments after October dues are met will be collected from your account.

Response Letter

Fitness First

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To whom ever it may concern,

Earlier today 03/09/09, I spoke with your complaints dept and cancelled my membership with you.

Sadly, a salesman who flagrantly lied to me when I purchased a 3 month membership, led me to sign up without any reason to suspect that I had to cancel my membership a full month before the end of the 3 months.

I realise that this is in the contract, but as a pivotal point, that Fitness First is repeatedly complained to about, this is nothing but brazen daylight robbery of the most aggressive kind. The repeat business from low use gym members must be appalling.

In response to finding out that the contract continued on a rolling monthly basis, I called to cancel only to find that compromise is impossible and that I am expected to pay October as well.

Where do you find members of staff with the passion to exact this kind of bureaucracy on people?

Do you breed them in cages and poke them with sticks made out of contracts, or have you beaten the Nazi hunters to it, rounded up all the remaining Nazi’s and Nazi sympathisers and in exchange for protection from the authorities, put them to work on your phones? Are your office desks made to look like Luftwaffe cockpits from 1942?

The manner that Fitness First approaches its contracts is not dis-similar to leading a group of starving Jews in to a furnace by telling them that food is in there. Maybe they should have read their contracts better?

The point of this letter is to confirm membership cancellation as I do not trust the person that I spoke to in any way shape or form.

Presumably Fitness First has a pre-employment test where potential employees have to steal fishing rods from African villagers or let the air out of paraplegics wheelchairs, and in response to complaint just insist over and over again that it was in the contract so there is nothing that they can do.

Why is there nothing that they can do? Why can’t Fitness First compromise in the face of reasonable complaint? Why do they hate their customer so much, I don’t understand?

So please accept this as my cancellation, I have sent it recorded delivery so that you can’t pretend that your dog ate or that it’s in my contract that I have to come round with the cancellation tattooed on the inside of my lungs to get it done.

I am a regular gym user, it is likely that I would have used Fitness First again in what is likely to be at least another 25 years of gym usage. At £48 a month presuming I would have been a member for 6 months a year, you have cost - you - £7200 in order to make an extra £48 in October of this year.

But then, it is in the contract.

Yours truly,

Alex Lewis