Have you ever found yourself committed to something that you just can't get out of, no matter how hard you try?
A TikToker found herself in a bit of a conundrum after trying to get out of a gym membership she no longer needed. As it turns out, gym memberships are the kind of thing you're basically committed to until you die — and maybe for awhile after, too.
Individual gyms handle things differently, of course, but in my experience, they make it as tough as possible to extricate yourself from the commitment. My gym only accepts auto-withdrawal from a checking account, meaning it's automatically taking money from your account every month, and isn't easy to stop, either.
This is TikToker Tara Rule, who goes by @pogsyy on the platform. Most of her content is relatable stuff — light fare about how difficult it is to wake up when the world is crumbling under the weight of late-stage capitalism. That sort of thing.
However, Tara found a significant adversary recently in the form of Planet Fitness.
In the video, she describes the situation: she wants to end her gym membership with Planet Fitness. It sounds straightforward enough, but the gym requires members to jump through quite a few hoops in order to do so.
The video includes audio that Tara says she recorded during a conversation with a Planet Fitness employee. She tells them that she'd tried cancelling repeatedly to no avail — over the phone or in-person, it didn't seem to matter. There was just no way to quit.
This is a common experience, as evidenced by the number of people who chimed in to say that similar things had happened to them. One user even said that it's difficult to cancel a membership for someone who's literally dead.
Tara said that the gym's shady business practices have cost her around $3,000, and she's sick of it. Her video racked up thousands of views and comments, and Planet Fitness was eventually forced to address the issue.
What should have taken a phone call or perhaps an in-person visit wound up being accomplished only after Tara shamed the company on social media. In an email to the Daily Dot, Planet Fitness said that Tara's membership is officially done — but they didn't say whether she'd been refunded.
Tara's clearly enjoying her time in the spotlight. It always feels good to take on the big guy and win, and that's exactly what she did. Planet Fitness is fully in damage control mode after this bad PR.
It seems like it's just about the toughest kind of membership to cancel. Check out Tara's original video above and then share your thoughts — and tips for quitting tough-to-quit memberships — in the comments section!
