This is the story of a failure, albeit a highly instructive one. I wrote a couple of months back about the fight between customers of LA Fitness and the new owners of the chain, Pure Gym, who wanted to close the pools and facilities of 30 of the 43 LA Fitness gyms. That fight has now been comprehensively lost.
LA Fitness is a mid range health and fitness company and Pure Gym is a newer variety, a basic, low cost gym. Membership costs for Pure Gym are around half of those for LA Fitness but it is basic- members swipe in, there are only machines, no cafe,personal trainers,saunas and- importantly- no pool. When members of various LA Fitness gyms across England heard about the plans to sell some were vocal in their opposition, arranged community action, got media interest, threatened to resign membership etc.
LA Fitness had, until 22 December, a gym in Highgate/ Kentish Town (interest declaration- all my neighbours ran the campaign to keep their fitness pool at the gym). Plans for closure had enraged the users of the gym,some of them elderly, some with small children who learnt to swim there, some who just enjoyed what they and the LA Fitness staff( now mostly out of jobs) had built up at LA Fitness- a community and social centre.
The campaign was great. The LA Fitness clients got Duncan Goodhew and Sharron Davies to support them; they got Camden Council to declare the gym and pool an Asset of Community Value(ACV); they got local MP Keir Starmer and Dame Tessa Jowell to back them. They wrote letters to Pure Gym, they met Humphrey Cobbold, Pure Gym’s CEO, for an unproductive meeting.
They got petitions together, they produced figures about how many children had learnt to swim at the pool. In other words they indicated as fully and strongly and accurately as they could, how a business venture had for the past 15 years benefitted a local community which had paid for it but which had also turned it into a true community asset.
And precisely none of it made any difference.Which is why it seems worth writing about this small local campaign again. The truth is that the levers of power are far away from any of the participants. Even Humphrey Cobbold doesn’t actually own most of his company- that would be CCMP Capital Advisors ,a US private equity firm. LA Fitness is also mostly owned by US private equity firm MidOcean. (Proud boast on their website- ” no one will ever out-work or out-hustle us for business”.)
The Kentish Town campaign brought people together. It created a burning sense of unfairness among residents and it did clarify a few things:
companies that exist primarily to pay shareholders and top executives have little interest in their local or community obligations.
fear of losing clients no longer exists.(cf mobile phone companies/banks/insurance companies)
companies are increasingly inward looking towards market movement rather than outward looking to us.
assets now means having the capacity to strip rather than to build upon.
But there was one human sentiment expressed by LA Fitness in all this. The campaigners agreed to meet for one final swim on Xmas Eve. But LA Fitness closed the premises a day early-” in light of the open unrest of the members”.
For sheer offensiveness to long standing clients this could hardly be bettered.