Originally Posted by TheSquealer

Sure. The economics are great. You can charge $300.00 per month for working them out with a fistful of crap from Sports Authority in a park. There are boot camps popping up everywhere in all cities charging retarded rates - 250.00 - 300.00 per month for 3 sessions per week, and outdoors at that. I think that in itself speaks volumes about the failure of gyms. Group fitness studios, small personal training studios etc. Those places are spreading like wildfire and all the large chain gyms are suffering dearly for it. Large gyms rely on selling the facility itself and all its amenities. With that comes massive overhead and people really don't tend to respond to all that stuff. I mean people who lift, lift. They typically don't care about basketball courts or swim pools. People who care about basketball don't tend to lift etc. The economics of a large gym are terrible and the cost of trying to be all things to all people is very prohibitive. I love racquetball. BUT.. what a fucking waste of real estate in a gym. 800 sq foot where only 2 people can use it at a time? You can put 16 people in a group class in that same space and charge them $150.00 a month for a 30-40 minute class. 10 classes a day X 16 people X 150.00 per month.... X a multiple of 2 or 3 since no one is coming every single day and you have some real money for little overhead and are better maximizing revenue per sq ft.

I can't give you exact stats. I don't pay much attention to the growth of those small businesses in correlation to the decline of large chains. The large chains are all hurting.

I am personally very grateful for large gyms. They did 2 very good things for us..

1) they got people familiar with the high cost of personal training
2) they fucked those clients over

That leaves the doors wide open to anyone with any sort of personality and business sense to step in. And when you have 2-3 large gyms in a 5 sq mile radius... that's a lot of dissatisfied clients who still are willing to pay for results and service and who are looking for an alternative.