My wife and I own two gyms, and no matter how easy we try to make it for people to cancel - you can literally email us at 9pm the day before you get charged and if we see it we'll cancel it - people still treat the charge back functionality like an "oops didn't mean it lol" thing.
Huge gyms like Gold's or PF have these oppressive terms because they have to, otherwise at their scale they'd be getting hit with multiple charge backs every day at every location. We have less than 300 members between our two facilities and still see one every month or two, mostly from people who don't understand what they're actually for - fraud, subpar delivery of whatever you purchased, or not receiving whatever you purchased - not as an easy refund button so you don't need to take 10 seconds to write an email.
The most we can hope to get out of fighting a charge back is the money back (less the additional charge back review fee which is $15-30 depending on merchant) and a very high likelihood of a 1-star Google and/or Facebook review. And that's best case scenario when the merchant is willing to side with us instead of the customer, which is why we're forced to now have contracts detailing cancellation policies. It will never happen, but I really wish consumers had to pay the charge back fees when they use the feature fraudulently like many do.
Huge gyms like Gold's or PF have these oppressive terms because they have to, otherwise at their scale they'd be getting hit with multiple charge backs every day at every location. We have less than 300 members between our two facilities and still see one every month or two, mostly from people who don't understand what they're actually for - fraud, subpar delivery of whatever you purchased, or not receiving whatever you purchased - not as an easy refund button so you don't need to take 10 seconds to write an email.
The most we can hope to get out of fighting a charge back is the money back (less the additional charge back review fee which is $15-30 depending on merchant) and a very high likelihood of a 1-star Google and/or Facebook review. And that's best case scenario when the merchant is willing to side with us instead of the customer, which is why we're forced to now have contracts detailing cancellation policies. It will never happen, but I really wish consumers had to pay the charge back fees when they use the feature fraudulently like many do.