Doug Mattison just wanted to cancel his gym membership but ended up having to cancel his credit card instead.
The 59-year-old could no longer afford the monthly fee, so a year after he signed up, he went back to the gym’s website to terminate it.
But it didn’t have an option for members to cancel online, so he called the gym and was told he had to come in person.
So he went to the gym, but even then he couldn’t cancel — he recalls the employees telling him that they didn’t “have the ability to stop it or do anything on it” because only his gym’s parent company was authorized to cancel his membership. “In the meantime,” he says, “they’re still charging my account.”
Mattison, who lives in Ohio, said the whole reason he chose this gym was that it didn’t have a binding contract — he assumed that when he no longer wanted to pay for a membership, he’d be able to get out of it.
After the parent company’s customer-service reps told him they couldn’t help him online or over the phone and did not offer him an alternative route, Mattison reached out to his bank, which ultimately canceled the card he’d used to pay for the membership and told him plenty of customers had trouble getting out of similar services.
“The bank even said that they see this happening a lot,” Mattison said, referring to customers having trouble with cancellations.
“They said the good news was that I only gave them a card number instead of my actual account number. Then it’s a lot more hassle.”
While Mattison was relieved to have found a solution, it took three months to get free. He described it as “the worst experience I’ve ever had with any type of membership.”
And he’s not alone — companies have gotten increasingly adept at trapping customers in what are known as “dark patterns,” drawing them in with a shiny new product or discounted subscription that ends up being difficult to get out of.
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The tactics companies use to keep people on the treadmill of recurring charges can range from slick, attractive product design to deceptive fraud.
And in a world where people seldom read the fine print, consumers don’t have much recourse when they find they can’t cancel something they no longer want.
In a 2022 survey from C+R Research, respondents estimated they spent an average of $86 a month on subscriptions, but when they were asked to individually break down their monthly payments based on their bank statements, they were, in reality, spending an average of $219.
Additionally, 42% of respondents indicated they’d forgotten they were continuing to pay for products they no longer used.
