PureGym - Formerly Blink Fitness — Local services in New York

I've been going to this gym since the week it opened many years ago. Here are some thoughts about it.

• It's a good value gym. You kind of have to judge a place by the value exchange. I pay $19/month – absolutely the lowest I've ever paid for a gym in NYC. What you get for that, in my view, is a good value. You have to keep expectations in proportion to that. • If you use the weight floor or need particular machines, you must avoid going at busy times. It's impossible to get an efficient workout in. Just the way it is. At their price point and the location (there aren't many gyms around there) it attracts tons of people from nearby neighborhoods. They're like an oversold, "extremely full" flight on a low cost domestic airline. • I never use the locker room to store anything of value or use the showers. It's just not at the level where I'm trusting anything that happens in there. • A personal gripe of mine: They need at least one more squat rack. There's routinely a line of people waiting for them. Some days it's 7 or 8 people deep. It is the only place where you see a queue of people, and there is nearly always a wait unless it's a very off-peak moment like 11am on a Tuesday. This occurs regularly while the treadmills and ellipticals are rarely 100% utilized (even at peak hours on days when the weather is crappy and nobody wants to run outside). Some people try to cheat the unspoken social system that has developed to manage this by telling the person using the machine to "reserve" their place (e.g. "I got this after you") like saving seats at a busy theater. No. It doesn't work that way. Stand in line like everyone else. In my opinion the management has an opportunity open up space that empty treadmills currently consume and add a rack. This should better reflect the actual demand for those things. • Things take a long time to be repaired. As I write this, there's a bike - one of two of its kind - that's been out of service for weeks. Water fountains take weeks to repair, etc. It's not Equinox, I get it. It is what it is. Things don't happen fast there. • Not that I pay much attention to the TVs there, but I appreciate that they don't have authoritarian propaganda on them (in all my years going there, I only observed that on one day). • A lot of gyms have this problem, but occasionally some bros camp in an area and have no regard for anyone else's right to reasonable access shared equipment. They bring their bags and jugs of water them and lay claim to an area. They'll tie up 5 pairs of dumbbells at a time for themselves. Others set up camp at a squat rack (which I already described as extremely scarce) and stay there for 90 minutes. • The staff is good. They do their best to keep things clean and generally they do a good job and I very much appreciate their...

LOW COST TO JOIN, HIGH COST TO CANCEL- YOU WILL BE BILLED WITHOUT REALIZING IT!!

I signed up for Blink because I thought this was a gym convenient to my home and work and the monthly fee was very low. The facilities itself are pretty good for $15 a month. However, the trouble began when I tried to cancel my membership. I am moving to an area without any Blink locations and wanted to cancel my membership so I emailed Blink Member Services ahead of time to ask how to do that. They said either a certified letter (first gym I've seen require that level of documentation to cancel membership not in person) or go to my location and speak to a Mood Lifter, or a specific type of employee at the gym. I went and did that on April 22nd (after calling ahead to make sure a Mood Lifter WAS working that day), cancelled my membership via the Kiosk, and was told to keep my card as I could use the gym until June 3rd. I noticed I was billed in the beginning of May and figured this was the prorated charge. But in June I was billed again and I stopped by the Park Slope location to ask what was going on. Apparently sometimes the Kiosk cancellations "don't go through" and I was billed an additional two months without even realizing it! I had no idea my membership was still active. This time, I waited at the location to get an email with proof that it was cancelled. The Kiosk cancellation didn't work AGAIN so the front desk person did it manually and had that email sent to me and explained that sometimes this happens. I had to pay a prorated charge on top of the two months of membership I was billed for without anyone notifying me via phone text or email that my membership was STILL active. The front desk person who assisted me very honestly told me I could try to get my two months of payment refunded to me but it was "probably a lost cause" given this gym's customer service. I contacted the Blink billing department and emailed membership services again - the billing department said this was a corporate issue and there was nothing she could do, the employee at the gym who assisted me the first time at the gym "isn't one of their employees" and "it's all location based," and membership services is yet to reply to two separate emails. This gym might pull you in with low costs to join, but keep in mind the high cancellation costs!! You will pay for months of membership without even realizing it! Another gym in Park Slope might have been more expensive but this experience taught me that the extra costs of that per month ARE worth saving myself this headache now, and feeling completely swindled in the end.

Moral of the story: save yourselves the phone calls/emails trying to get your money back and just take your business...

Would not recommend you get a membership here, had my bag, including wallet and house keys, stolen from my locker, which was locked and secured, when I asked to talk to the manager and see the film of the security cameras, I was told the manager was dealing with another priority issue going on, and that I should go file a police report. When I got to the precinct they told me I had to call 911 from the gym, so I went back to the gym, called and reported and waited for an hour and a half for the police, in which time the manager nor any employees talked to me about the situation.

The responding officer also said this was the second time in a couple months they’d responded to a call about someone having thier belongings stolen from thier locker.

Update to my previous review regarding how this Blink fitness handled the situation where all of my belongings were stolen from my locker.

After a week of dealing with continuous phone calls from the police about the incident, I went back to this Blink today because unfortunately this is the closest and most affordable gym in the area, and after checking in was followed up the stairs by an employee who told me i needed to come back to the front desk and take a picture for my “Blink profile”

After asking why now, after about 6 months of having a membership here with my account not having a picture, do I need to have a picture taken? Was it because I had all my stuff stolen from my locker, still unaddressed by Blink? Was it because someone had to file a police report in thier gym and they realized they didn’t even have a picture of the member?

And yes, after they took it, still no acknowledgement of the situation from any manager. If you can help it by any means, I would not sign up for a...