Criticism
Numerous customers have reported Gold's Gym franchises acting in dishonest and unscrupulous ways. They have reported advertised deals not being honored, billing irregularities, contract terms being fraudulently altered by sales staff after signing and problems canceling accounts or relocating. A Gold's Gym in Provo, Utah was successfully sued for fraud in 2006 for changing a contract after it was signed in 1999. Like many gyms, some Gold's Gym franchisees lure customers with free sign-up or gift certificates with fabricated nominal values, and then require long term contracts that are very difficult to get out of without paying cancellation fees and following long and inconvenient procedures (such as having to send a certified letter to their central billing office a month in advance). In the past, gym websites did not give membership rates and the gyms would usually not tell customers the rate over the phone, asking instead that customers come to the gym to have a tour and discussion, which often included a heavy sales pitch. Some Gold's gyms require "fitness assessments" before supplying a membership.
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Famous quotes containing the word criticism:
“However intense my experience, I am conscious of the presence and criticism of a part of me, which, as it were, is not a part of me, but a spectator, sharing no experience, but taking note of it, and that is no more I than it is you. When the play, it may be the tragedy, of life is over, the spectator goes his way. It was a kind of fiction, a work of the imagination only, so far as he was concerned.”
—Henry David Thoreau (1817–1862)
“I, with other Americans, have perhaps unduly resented the stream of criticism of American life ... more particularly have I resented the sneers at Main Street. For I have known that in the cottages that lay behind the street rested the strength of our national character.”
—Herbert Hoover (1874–1964)
“I consider criticism merely a preliminary excitement, a statement of things a writer has to clear up in his own head sometime or other, probably antecedent to writing; of no value unless it come to fruit in the created work later.”
—Ezra Pound (1885–1972)