It's Highway Robbery, I Tell You

So the gym building that I have gone to for the past 4 years or so closed on Dec. 24. An evil developer bought the site and is planning to tear it down, along with the great billiards hall that I rarely went to but meant to go to frequently that is above the gym and the parking garage next to it. These three functional buildings that serve a neighborhood need of sorts will be replaced by very high end condos that serve no actual need that I can tell. I don't see tons of rich assholes homeless and wandering the street because they can't find an apartment to drop $2 million+ on. (Bitter? No, I swear I am not bitter about this at all. Sure.)

Since there is a fairly decent overlap between the people who go to my gym and the rich assholes who can afford a condo starting at $2 million, the evil developer is rebuilding a newer, shinier gym into the condo's basement and commercial space as an "amenity" to ensure that the annoying rich people with $2 million and more available to buy an apartment will find their "lifestyles" match the apartments. In the ensuing several years of demolition and new construction, which will make my neighborhood noisy and filthy, a temporary location has been renting for some of us displaced by the process.

The temporary location is only around the corner from the old building. However, it is about 1/10th of the size, so many members were not "invited" to join the temporary gym. Initially, Husband and I were among those displaced persons, but a kind guy at the front desk took pity on me and my increasingly large gut and slipped us in. The new location opened on the 28th. On that day, I discovered that you can take a formerly stripped down gym (it used to be a very bare bones gym before it became my gym), add fancy tiles to the floor and flatscreen TVs with cable, and call it my gym, thus charging very high rates to go there, but it will not actually be anything more than a stripped down gym with no locker rooms that used to go for $45 per month and now is $85.

That my friends, is what I call highway robbery. Robbery! (I may join another gym after all the dust from other people's new years resolutions settles down. But combined with the other gym refugees from my gym's closure and the new year's resolvers, the other gym near me is REALLY overcrowded these days.) Thanks for letting me vent my anger as a victim of a gym crime.