We have joined our local Y and unjoined a couple of times based upon our financial situation and it has never been a problem.

You are awesome. I’m glad you’re a good sport about this. I would still be royally pissed off. Great blog!

If possible, get it in both languages. If that’s not possible, I’d try to get either an independent translator you hire and pay or a friend who is good at translation to go over it.

Either way, I wouldn’t worry about it quite as much with a contract in China (I’m assuming that’s where you are?). Contracts there don’t tend to carry the same amount of weight as they do here – especially business contracts. Sure, someone might still try to take more of your money (or deliver less for it) than you wanted, but chances are they’re not going to use the fine print to do so.

Great job of explaining your story. Your cautionary tale is something everyone should remember. There is a lot more that people sign automatically without thinking. This includes services on the internet.

Then the gym closed down.

Fortunately, I ended up moving and there was another location near my new residence. Hurrah!

Then THAT location closed down.

Sigh…

I did once have a gym contract that promised my fees would never go up. Then they got bought out by another company. The other company said they would honor that contract. Then they started adding wording that they could raise the rates next time, and I kept making them cross it out. Finally, one year they wouldn’t cross it out, and that was my last year with them. My two friends I was going with just paid the extra for a while before they quit.

I would like to say I always read the contract. For short things on receipts, I make a little joke out of it, “You mean I have to promise to PAY for this?” On some of these internet things where you have to read pages and pages of crap about promising not to spam everyone or use cuss words or change the programming to make money for yourself, etc., I just can’t stand to do it. I have the same problem with a lot of user manuals where they tell you OVER and OVER not to plug it in while you are in the shower and not to eat it while it is on fire and whatever wacky stuff some imbecile has sued them over.

I’ve never had to deal with the black box thing–I think I might just turn around and leave.

I worked for a Canadian retailer dealing phones for a couple of years. Your scenario is pretty standard when it comes to dealing with Rogers. I had one customer who moved to the U.S. and bought the first generation I-Phone while there. He ended up moving back to Canada, and brought his phone. Because the phone was SIM card activated and un-locked, he could only use Rogers in Canada (as they were the only ones using that technology other than Virgin and Fido – neither had local numbers in our rural area). I told him that he could use the phone as a PHONE, but would not be able to use it for internet access unless he was using it with Wi-Fi (I’d had previous experience TRYING to set up the original I-Phone – this was before it was brought into Canada under Canadian carriers). He asked me to double-check, because what’s the point of using an I-Phone without internet. We called customer service and the dealer help-lines, and were told by 4 different people that it would work (the techs said the problems had been worked out), and 1 person that it wouldn’t. We set the phone up, we picked a plan, we entered all his personal information, he paid the deposit of $400 with his credit card – direct to Rogers (bad credit means a deposit with them), and signed his 3 year contract. He was all ready to go. We turned the phone on with his new SIM card. No internet. This might not have been a big issue for him, had we lived in a town/city that actually uses Wi-Fi or has it readily available. We don’t. So, we called Rogers back. We told them the situation. They said he can cancel the contract within the first 24 hours as long as the phone hasn’t been used. The issue? They refused to refund his $400 deposit right away. Also, they had charged his card automatically for his first month of usage. They would have to send him a cheque. It took a month for him to get his money back, at which time he came back into the store to thank me for trying to warn him. He also bought a prepaid Bell phone from me. Lesson learned.

http://thisiswhyubroke.wordpress.com
“Because credit crack is wack”

I had the same thing happen to me when I cancelled my YMCA membership. They charged me for the next 30 days.

@questioner
I picked THIS gym just for the pool. I work out quite a bit, but I needed a gym WITH a pool. It was between Lifetime & another local gym and I went with Lifetime because of the promotional offer – big mistake =)

I worked for a company once upon a time which offered a seriously discounted cell phone contract for their employees. When you left you either cancelled the contract or moved it across into your own name and then paid for a standard tariff.

People were used to my number so I decided to keep it when I left.

Then a bill came through for around $600. What?!

Turns out that the fine print said that if you left you also had to pay the full price for the handset they had given you! No mention of this when we all signed up, no mention when I left, no mention when I spoke to them to change it all over.

I’m afraid it *was* in the fine print so I had to pay it but it was an excellent lesson in paying more attention to the fine print (and on how cell phone providers rip you off!)

Your cancellation policy is probably legal, but it’s a bit predatory, and there may be some wiggle room. For this reason, you can sometimes still haggle over these fines.

Another good example is a waiver of liability. I sign these all the time, but if I did get injured, and I thought the business was responsible, you can bet I would look into getting justified compensation. You can’t sign away all your rights…

Why did you choose to join a gym just for a pool?

Most gyms WILL continue to bill you and say it is a “mistake” when you catch on. Then it will take 60-90 days to sort out the refund while they bank on you again forgetting about it etc…

Same thing with cell phones and any other contract driven service. It takes getting burned once for everyone to learn this lesson.

This is a very important post because most service contracts will have something catchy in them.

At a different gym they had the 30 day cancellation policy as well, it was somewhat ambiguous as to whether or not the 30 days was to stop service or stop billing. I saw it and asked questions about what it meant. They assured that 30 day cancellation was for service, and if I went to cancel, I wouldn’t have to pay for another month. When I finally went to cancel, and they swore up and down the wording was for billing and that they would never say it was for service.

While I miss the gym, don’t miss the salesmen and the managers there.

-MBirchmeier

But what gets me about this story isn’t that they passed you the paperwork and didn’t comment that you signed it without reading – they actively attempted to stop you reading the conditions by failing to present them.
Surely their are local consumer laws against that sort of thing?
Don’t they HAVE to give you a copy of what you signed??
I’d definitely be doing a chargeback and I think a letter to Better Business (or local equivalent) is in order!

We’d call our agent’s office and be told, oh, that comes from corporate I can’t tell you what it means or what to do about it…no, you can’t call them, you have to send them a letter.

We ended up talking to the regional general manager, got a lot of gladhanding and assurances, but the letters kept coming…we just ignored them. If they’d dropped our coverage I would have gone to the state attorney general, though.

I still wish that I had just returned the damn stuff and eaten the fee. Or argued more. I finally threw the rest of the stuff in the trash a few months ago (6 years after the fact).

I now read every receipt, every lease, every everything. I too have had lots of sighing landlords. But, happily, I did once have a landlord that insisted on going through all the details with me. Turns out he used to work in tenants’ rights and was super gung-ho that all his tenants be well-informed.

In fact, a company called GameStation tried out a little April Fool’s experiment this year. They put a clause in their fine print that THEY WOULD OWN THE CUSTOMER’S SOUL. You could ‘opt out’ (and even get a money voucher for doing so!), but since no one ever reads the fine print, 88 percent of the customers didn’t bother. GameStation did give everyone back their souls (ok, silly), but the point is, no one reads the fine print, and they SHOULD.
http://newslite.tv/2010/04/06/7500-shoppers-unknowingly-sold.html