3-Year Gym Contract Has Woman Fit to Be Tied

When Rachel Hobbs, a West Los Angeles resident, joined Bally Total Fitness last April, she says, she made it clear she wanted only a one-year contract.

“The Bally’s representative I spoke with [at the gym at 1914 S. Bundy Drive] was insistent that I get the three-year membership,” she recalled. “I had several reasons I did not want a membership of this lengthy duration, and told her so.

“In fact, I was adamant that I wanted the one-year, rather than the three-year, contract, and she seemed to finally relent. . . . She told me I could get the one-year contract and printed out a sheet documenting this.”

But, Hobbs told me, when she signed the $669 contract, she didn’t read the fine print, or realize it was “a contract with boilerplate that says something else altogether.” Now she has a three-year contract with 36 monthly payments billed through a credit card, and she has been trying vainly to get out of it.

Try that with Bally Total Fitness, “the largest health club in the entire world,” and it’s usually not easy. Bally spokesmen say that under certain circumstances they will let you out, but there have been complaints in many localities across the country, including class-action suits, saying it is very difficult to terminate even a questionable Bally contract.

Five years ago, in a Massachusetts case, Bally agreed to pay more than $300,000 to settle allegations by authorities that company employees engaged in high-pressure sales and other improper business practices.

Bally, moreover, is hardly unique in its history. I’ve had a stream of consumer complaints that quitting various health clubs can be a most difficult undertaking.

In dealing with Bally’s regional supervisor in Southern California, Rick Nasca; its vice president for public relations at corporate headquarters in Chicago, David Southern; and Bally staff at gyms in West L.A. and on the Palos Verdes Peninsula about the Hobbs complaint, I’ve been given unusually evasive and contradictory statements.

For instance, Nasca told me, “We’ve never offered a one-year contract . . . nothing but 36 months.”

But Southern, at the beginning of a letter he faxed me, declared, “Bally Total Fitness does not sell three-year memberships.”

I contacted the Bally gyms in Palos Verdes and West L.A. and asked if they offered a one-year membership. Notwithstanding Nasca’s assertion, both said they did.

Could Hobbs get out of her three-year contract, I asked Nasca.

“Sure, if there’s a situation where someone doesn’t want to go anymore, we can sign off on that,” he answered. “We work with people. We’ve had six or seven such cancellations so far this year.”

But when Hobbs called him to discuss just that, the conversation quickly became acrimonious. Both confirm that Nasca hung up on Hobbs.

Hobbs said Nasca wouldn’t even agree to send her a copy of her contract, which she said she had misplaced. Nasca called Hobbs “very loud, abusive. I couldn’t get a word in edgewise.”

Nasca did, however, send me a copy of what he said was Hobbs’ contract. It contained her signature and the initials REH under the payment terms.

When I sent it on to Hobbs, she confirmed that it was her signature but denied initialing anything and pointed out that her signature was on a different page from the terms. Besides, she said, Nasca hadn’t sent me the whole contract.

Hobbs, an attorney, has done quite a bit of research on this matter, and she mentioned that when she called the Better Business Bureau to file a complaint, “They told me that Bally’s has received several hundred complaints, many of them [on] its sales practices.”

I called Gary Almond, general manager of the Better Business Bureau for Southern California, and was told that, in this region alone, there have been 353 complaints about Bally practices in the last three years.

After reviewing them at my request, he said they reflected “an assorted number of issues, including some where people are complaining about the 36-month contract.”

“We get complaints from a lot of people who want to cancel their contract and don’t meet the criteria for doing so,” he said.

Nasca told me that Bally has “a million members we claim in Southern California, so if we have 300-some complaints . . . that’s not a substantial number.” Similarly, in his letter, Southern called the number of complaints “extremely small in the context of our scope of operations.”

“In fact, the Better Business Bureau has said that ‘the volume and type of complaints the bureau has received have not been deemed unusual for a company in this industry,’ ” Southern reported.

But Almond begged to differ. “This is more than we usually get about a single firm,” he said, adding that since Bally is the largest company in the business, there is really no comparison with others.

I called Southern’s office to ask just who at the Better Business Bureau had given him the quote he cited. But he did not call me back.

Almond, meanwhile, added, “I have opened a dialogue with Bally.

“There will be some more discussions,” he said. “But we’ve already had a heavy-duty conversation. . . . They told me there are more complaints from us [in Southern California] than anywhere.”

Almond said Bally has stated that it’s willing to let a customer out of a three-year contract if the customer moves more than 25 miles away from its gym.

“But there are complaints that customers have moved more than the 25 miles, stipulated and still find it difficult to get out of the contract,” he said.

It is perhaps indicative that Almond sounded tougher on this matter than any other I’ve approached him on while writing this column.

Hobbs, meanwhile, expressed frustration. She said she hasn’t lost interest in fitness, but would like to move to another gym.

This is a bad situation, and Bally should try to come to satisfactory terms with Hobbs, not to mention its other unhappy customers.

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Ken Reich can be contacted with your accounts of true consumer adventure at (213) 237-7060 or by e-mail at ken.reich@latimes.com.