Technically, Karina Frost’s yearlong membership at a Toronto fitness club was up, but actually cutting ties with the gym wasn’t easy.
When Ms. Frost, a 28-year-old Toronto social worker, tried to talk to Extreme Fitness’s staff about leaving in 2008, they tried to upsell her on personal training sessions. When she filled out the paperwork to terminate her contract, the club continued charging her credit card for four months.
“They just made it sound like I would never be able to get out of it and like I’d pretty much signed my life away,” she says.
Feeling she had no other options, she informed the club she was moving out of the country. She used her expired student visa, U.S. passport and Illinois driver’s licence to make her case. In reality, she stayed put in Toronto, but was finally off the hook for payments.
Never doubt the ingenuity of the consumer.
From fibbing about moving to spotting loopholes in contractual legalese, many have taken extreme measures to break contracts without penalty. However, it’s much to the chagrin of service providers, who have long used discounted rates or free products to draw in consumers to long-term contracts with high cancellation fees.
Nevertheless, the tables are turned: Consumer forums are rife with queries about how to break contracts and tales from the heroes who have done so.
A Canadian man apparently quit his gym three weeks after signing on for a long-term membership. To reclaim the money he’d paid ahead of time, he fabricated a story about his father suffering a heart attack. He told the gym he had to move back in with his parents to support his mother.
In another case cited by The Washington Post, a man had a friend fax a fake death certificate to his wireless provider to get out of his contract without having to pay a cancellation fee (the company caught on, though).
Ms. Frost knew she wanted to quit the gym a few months into her contract, but waited till the year was up and spoke to two staff members about her decision.
“They said I wouldn’t be able to do it and this and that and there wasn’t a good reason to cancel,” Ms. Frost recalls, saying the experience made her feel as though she were being bullied.
Taso Pappas
But customers don’t always have to stretch the truth to break free of unwanted contracts.
After Andrew Ngui, a 34-year-old designer, had a 10-day trial run of an Extreme Fitness location near his home in Toronto, he decided he didn’t want to stay with the gym. When he tried to get out of the contract he signed with an in-person visit, he says he felt intimidated.
And so he found something he knew no staff member could argue with: a letter sent by registered mail to the gym stating his rights as a consumer to withdraw from a contract without penalty within Ontario’s 10-day “cooling off period.” It probably helped that he copied the Ministry of Consumer Services
“People don’t take other people seriously until such time they receive something in writing,” Mr. Ngui says. Extreme Fitness was unable to comment on Mr. Ngui’s case because he is no longer in the company’s system.
