She is a gym member maybe 1 out of 3 months because she is perpetually rotating through the deal she can get.
The secret to this stuff is boring - persistent, continuous effort.
If you can't even maintain a regular gym membership, you will not get that effort in.
She's been complaining for over a decade as she continuous this charade.
To be fair, gym memberships are often crappy rent-seeking contracts. They love it when people start memberships for their New Year’s resolutions and then stop coming in February but keep paying, and they often try to hike the prices on you, renew automatically, and make it difficult to cancel. I’m perfectly fine with paying for a gym but I absolutely hate signing up for memberships. Currently I’m going to a city-run gym that has a day rate, and it’s more expensive than a monthly or yearly rate, and I still pay it happily and I feel like I’m getting a good deal, because I’m paying as I go for what I use and I’m not locked in and there’s no risk of wasting money.
Maybe she’s actually staying more motivated to go this way, maybe her engagement is higher than if she paid. Or, maybe she’d love it if you gave her a gift and pre-paid for 6 or 12 months of membership somewhere? You could even tell her you got a deal, which is true regardless of what you pay. Valentine’s Day is here…
I'm amazed at this point, given the "subscriptions are a nightmare to cancel" meme, that nobody's turned that into a marketing message. Some of the gym ads say "cancel anytime", but "sure, just bring in this blood-endorsed document countersigned by at least five Supreme Court justices" is still implied.
Services that say "prepay up-front and we'll never bill you" is a viable selling premise. Gift subscriptions are an obvious viable business that comes out of that model.
I wanted to get my father a gift subscription to the local newspaper, and they basically had no idea how to handle a fixed-term subscription-- all they could point to were recurring auto-pay setups.
In 2016, a gym in Canada had a news article written about it in The Globe and Mail, a national newspaper [1], due to the notability of its policy at the time of only offering a pay-as-you-go plan. You would pay each time you visited, until you hit a cap at a maximum fee per month—this would make future visits free for this period. The marketing clearly worked, as the business earned a national news article solely due to this policy.
However, after some time, the gym changed the policy to offer discounts for people who signed a contract—effectively make it more expensive for people to pay-as-you-go without easier cancellation. As of now, I can no longer find pricing on their website (maybe it's there, but I've looked around a while), nor any mention of their once-notable pay-as-you-go model. Instead, the gym's website now focuses on encouraging members to sign up for a personal trainer.
At least in this case, the gym showed that the "prepay and we'll never bill you" policy was, as you predicted, a headline-grabbing policy. But it appears that the owners decided it was more profitable to either cancel or de-emphasize the policy and promote the usual payment model for gyms, even at the cost of standing out from other gyms.
You actually hit the nail on the head re: gift giving.
I stumbled upon this years ago with family more..
If you want to gift anything nice to family who is more scarcity mindset, you absolutely HAVE to talk up the deal/discount you got, or how you paid for it with points that were going to expire, or something. It's also better if the thing you are gifting has opaque pricing / is somewhat custom or uncommon so they can't just google the price.
Anyway.. everything turns into sales/marketing sometimes!
