UKH

Went to a local bouldering gym last night and was told my annual 'membership' had expired and I need to fill in their safety waiver again (fair enough) and on top of that pay an extra £5 'annual membership fee' on top of the usual day pass price.

Now I don't have a problem with paying a once-off joining fee for admin related tasks when joining a gym for the first time, but this just seems a bit cheeky asking everyone to cough up an extra fiver annually because your 'membership' has expired. There is nothing done on their end apart from making you sign a form on a tablet. 

This is the second time or third time I've had to pay it as well which is the annoying bit. I may not bother renewing it next time it lapses! 

Just to be clear - I don't have any form of actual monthly type membership with this gym apart from being on their records as a registered climber.

Is it fair for gyms to charge this type of recurring fee on top of their normal day pass fees?

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Yeah having to pay a fee for the privilege of paying a fee stinks. It's a massive money spinner for gyms though, and they get away with it because others do it. 

I used to work at a gym and they really regretted that they had a one-off membership fee instead of an annually renewing one like the other gyms in town. Reckoned it lost them thousands.

I have a feeling its a good way of covering the cost of their CRM systems, but as you say its an easy way to make a few extra thousand a year from essentially not doing anything ! 

Perhaps we all need to collectively stick it to the man and not pay them  

The 2 walls that I use have an annual fee but this is optional and quickly recovered over the first few visits, providing a saving in the long run.

It is a pricing model, you would pay a similar amount spread over a number of visits if a flat fee model was used.

The membership model introduces affordability issues, the flat fee model can be more costly in the long term.

I've had to re-fill in safety waivers at various walls, but never had to pay any type of fee. 

That said.  It's only a fiver per year, wouldn't buy you a pint round my way.  It's barely enough to bother getting worked up about.

Isn't it a bit of a "tourist tax"?  Otherwise they'd just charge a bit more on the entry/passes, and then regular users would pay more?

Seems a bit crap

Indeed it’s not much - I think it’s more the principal of charging it for no reason other than profiteering for the sake of it 

Got a very similar issue going on with swimming pools round here. You can't just pay and play any more, you have to sign up for a membership and to be sent lots and lots of lovely marketing material. If you're an old person who doesn't have an email address, then tough, you aren't allowed to exercise here. If you're a young sporty kid whose parents won't sign off on an email account, then no, you can't come and play here. If you're a slightly stroppy adult who reads what they're signing up to .... well, I put their tablet back on the desk (no paper sign-up forms, we have to show we're cutting-edge by having everyone use our ipad), looked at the completely empty swimming pool, and effed off a couple of miles up the road to the noisy, busy council-run facility. Where you just hand your five quid over at the desk and then crack on ....

My local wall in Huddersfield is pretty economical, despite it probably being a bit tricky to run a good wall with regular resets and new holds at a healthy profit. Despite this, it can feel like a significant expense...

The other walls I use regularly are Kendal and Lancaster, and they are far more expensive... It feels like you're giving a pint of blood each time.

The real problem, of course, is long-term stagnating wages in a flatlining economy that has been bled dry by over a decade of Tory government that has systematically transferred wealth from working people to capital and the wealthiest individuals. I suggest we ask the record number of billionaires to pay for our membership fees...!

Is blaming the Tory's for absolutely everything the new Godwins?

And of course if we want to see wall staff paid better (and they do tend to be very low paid) then we need to be willing to pay higher membership/entry fees.  There's nowhere else they can get it from.

Can we blame them for poor punctuation?

Profiteering.  Jesus, it's a climbing wall that very likely makes a very slim profit, where probably the bulk of people that work there are barely earning a living wage.

I mean I know us climbers are tight, but a whole thread because of the "principal" of paying a fiver?  

Indeed. You can also look at the annual membership thing as a reward scheme for regular visitors* (they pay less overall than very occasional visitors). At the end of the day, the wall needs an certain income and will structure its fees to get that income. One way or another.

* regular visitors are better from a cash-flow perspective.

You have to have a membership to climb there - its non-negotiable so the visiting climber thing doesn't apply otherwise it would make sense and I wouldn't have started the thread in the first place. As I said its more the principal rather than it being a fiver. It may be a fiver today but a tenner next week.. etc 

Obviously walls should charge however much they need for their entrance fees and I don't have a problem with that, it's more the principal of a fee for no apparent reason other than profit (I assume). 

eg. UKC charged you a fiver every year for just having a user account. Im pretty sure it wouldnt go down too well if there wasn't a reason behind it!

Yes it does. Someone who comes once a year pays more per visit than someone who comes once a week. Forget the 'membership' label, it's meaningless. It's just the way income is structured.

It's just income. You have no idea if the wall makes 'profit' (income minus expenditure) or not. A pound of income from a 'membership' fee is exactly the same as a pound from an 'entrance' fee.

Not comparable since you don't pay-per-visit here.

You could say it's the principal of a fee for no apparent reason other than profit... 

Or you could look at it another way say it's the cost of keeping your personal details on file for another year.  And with that comes GDPR regulations, firewalls, storage footprint on their server, contribution to infrastructure and staffing to maintain these, IT support, web security, periodic updating and replacement of hardware, software and databases etc.

These thing all have to be paid for, and members who are registered on their system are a cost, regardless or not whether they're visiting and paying regular entrance fees, so bearing all this in mind, and the low cost I think this charge is reasonable.

We can and definitely should...! Have you been in a school recently? But, keeping people illiterate doesn't seem to be doing the Tories any harm...

I, of course, completely agree. Wall staff should be paid more. £15 UK minimum wage would be a good start.

I completely agree with you that the Tories are contemporary fascists. That is the point you're making, right?

I wouldn't say they're to blame for absolutely everything, but... well... if we expand from the Tory party to talk about capital in general... well, then almost everything, yes.

That's about as much sense as blaming that stupid monkey that thought coming down out of the trees was a good idea. Yes, many of the bad things we see now wouldn't have happened, but...

All of that is true. But it is also true of every website or business you have ever registered with or bought something from. 

My information is probably stored with about 100 companies. Is that £500 a year that I owe? Most of them are services just like the climbing wall. 

No of course not, clearly different companies and services have different charging and funding models. 

I think it would be a little rich for a huge multinational which make billions of pounds of profit a year to levy such a charge, and I would probably tell EDF or Sainsbury's to go F themselves if they asked. 

But it surely isn't a surprise to you that I take a different view on my local wall which makes a slim profit and is mostly run by people who do it for their passion rather than their pocket? 

I suspect most of the companies that hold your data are far less cherished, less important to you, and work on a much higher profit margin than your local climbing wall.

I like to support local businesses that mean something to me.  If the OP doesn't want to pay the fiver out of principle and views it as "profiteering" that up to him, but he asked for opinions and that's mine.  Support local businesses that you cherish, or lose them. 

And besides, it's a fiver per year FFS.

Um... no it's not. Politics is about choices, not fate or the unfolding of evolutionary processes. I was being tongue in-cheek, but if you can't understand that small businesses like climbing walls and people who depend on a wage/salary are struggling with costs because of political decisions made by the Conservatives, then you need yo have a rethink.

I do understand very well. I was commenting on your assertion that "... capital can be blamed for almost everything" (to paraphrase) which is a pretty vacuous slogan.

Is it? Have you not heard before: "The history of all hitherto existing society is the history of class struggle"? There are hidden depths to an analysis that begins from that perspective. Personally, I would say it was revelatory.

I blame the school principals.

Indeed. Most religions rely on 'revelations'.

Ah... you're one of those people who think they are intelligent because they are able to follow so well the well-worn groove of commonly-held opinion. Good day, and enjoy the rest of your life.

If your decision not to renew membership of a wall is based on a £5 fee to maintain records, waivers etc. then it must be a rubbish wall 😂

Nothing to do with fairness, either take their deal or go elsewhere.

Ah yes, I imagine one could make the same argument with energy companies, well perhaps not. Clearly one can feel a charge is fair or unfair irrespective of whether they've got the opportunity to go elsewhere.

This is all not very relevant. Your whole justification for the charge, about data being a cost to a business (server space GDPR and regulations apparently) didn't make any sense. It that were the case, businesses would delete your data after a day. We would all carry an NFC fob with our registration details and sign in temporarily each visit with that.

It's almost as if the complete opposite is true and companies massively value customer data. 

If you now want to relate it to some sort of charity for small businesses then that's fine but that wasn't the point you were making initially. 

Better to just 45p on the monthly fee, they are creating extra admin to cover the extra admin of renewing. Besides they should be grateful at the moment that their membership hasn't been culled to cover home energy bills! 

Apologies, I thought that in a debate we are allowed to make a number of different points to support our view.  Hence why I’ve made several, one of which was in response to your facetious question.

In future I’ll make sure to just keep on making the same point repeatedly in order to avoid rebuke. 

Can’t be arsed talking about this any more so I’ll finish on the original point I made.

It’s only a bloody fiver.

Perhaps ask the manager to tell you what the outgoings are for the wall. Insurance, utilities and staff to name a few. Climbing walls are not raking it in! But at the end of the day they do need to make some money, otherwise what is the point? They are not a public service. 

Also, the UK is well behind other countries when it comes to entry prices. We are still relatively cheap. If we have to pay the odd £5 membership fee each year, so what?

I visit several different walls during the year, sometimes only once, and guess what, I end up paying a membership fee several times. Well if that’s the price I have to pay when visiting a new/different wall so be it! If the wall is good I might go back, if it’s crap, I’ll try another! 

I blame everybody else, except me.

Engage smug mode.

I mean, you can make all the additional points you want, it just doesn't make the one I rebutted any more valid. But yeah, grrr Tesco or something.

Poor Marek... 9 people dislike me wishing him a good day and hoping he enjoys his life. And counting! I feel you are being a bit unkind to him... Poor Marek

This seems quite simple to me. Your local wall charges an annual fiver. You don't like it. The answer is don't pay and go somewhere else. If enough people do the same then they'll drop the charge

Well I'm not the OP. There was one wall near me that charged an annual fee (I think this was for future discounted entry to be fair) but they've dropped it since three more centres opened within a few miles of it in the last few years. 

I assume that the OP's wall has little in the way of competition because charging newcomers an additional fiver for their first visit unless you're the only game in town is pretty dumb. If the wall is just miles better than every other wall in the area then they can just charge an extra quid for entry which will make them far more money from repeat visitors in the long run. You don't tell your mates who want to try climbing for the first time to go the centre that charges a random fee that makes them half again the price of another one a mile or two down the road. 

1. As pointed out, you potentially benefit from this £5/year if it allows the wall to charge less per session - you being a regular climber at the wall (I presume). Your climbing is effectively being subsidised by tourists, in that instance, and I don't really understand why you would begrudge that. Would you rather pay 20p more per session because it's more 'transparent'?
2. The storage of your details for a year patently has a cost, even if it is minimal. Software needs to be licensed, IT systems need to be maintained...it's not free. So if your issue is that you're paying for nothing...imagine how rubbish it would be if they had to take five minutes to rummage through a filing cabinet of paper records every time you went for a climb.
3. Centres are under no obligation to have a transparent income structure where what you pay bears any mathematical relationship to the service they're providing. They can charge what they like in a structure that they believe is the right balance of attractive and profitable, and you are free to choose whether to pay it or not. Profiteering is a bizarre accusation to level at small businesses running on tight margins to please an ever-unpleasable demographic of people who don't want to spend any money. It's not like the wall is a basic essential like energy or water, that you have no choice but to pay for in order to just live.

From the start the OP made clear that he was objecting on principle, not because it would break the bank.

No he didn’t. Read his first post. Doesn’t mention principle. Said it was about that in later posts when he got challenged, that’s not from the start.

Also he’s used terms such as “profiteering”.  That term is about money, not principle.

The last wall I went to charged me €1 for a beer and I had to get it out of the crate and open it myself, didn't even get a glass. Now that's blatant profiteering!

Now _that_ sounds like my kind of wall

I’ll add profiteering to the UKC trigger list 😆