Today I went back to Brookline briefly. I was looking in the mailbox for a check. Afterwards I finally cancelled my BSC membership. Yesterday I cancelled the Verizon service. So other than forwarding the mail to Newton things are all getting wrapped-up in Brookline. Whenever I wrap something up I get the feeling of a new start which might have contributed to my stopping into TJ Max to purchase a new button-up shirt. It also could have been that I didn't want to deal with the parking people at the BSC Allston club. The experience of cancelling at BSC and their whole business model has left a bad impression on me about them. They seem to be the kind of business that works hard to acquire a new customer and then not only doesn't care about the customer's experience but actively works to prevent the customer from leaving to the detriment of the overall customer experience. When you try to cancel you can't do so online, you can't do it on the phone, and you can't do it via the mail unless it is through certified mail. Upon receipt of the cancellation it is considered cancelled 30 days later. This means that you can use their gym for the next 30 days but it is also another revenue cycle for them to charge despite an attempt to cancel before another billing cycle occurs. If a customer happens to be "in a contract" then they claim that you can't cancel at all without filling to the end of the contract. While I somewhat understand their point on the contract situation since they offer preferential pricing for longer time commitments than month to month BUT it isn't like they are giving me a big piece of hardware like a phone or DSL router that they need to sell off. The most similar thing is that they need to pay off the commissioned sales rep who pushes the high cost memberships.

All of this lead me to believe that they have determined that once someone cancels their membership they are never coming back. This is a self fulfilling prophecy on their part since my reaction to the hard-line you can't leave policy and the difficult scenario of my not using a service for 4 months at all that costs over $50 per month makes me not interested in recommending that anyone join or ever joining again.

This is in contrast to NetFlix which I cancelled a few years ago because the movies weren't coming fast enough. They rescued their relationship at first by offering a plan that was more attractive to me as I was cancelling. The new plan had fewer movies for a smaller price. I liked it for a while then cancelled anyways because the local video store allowed me to rent 3 movies at any given time and I could just grab them off the shelf. But now that I moved I don't have that same opportunity with a local video store. Instead I looked at Netflix and Blockbuster and found that Netflix had added a good video download service and had a reference from my parents that their delivery is now much faster. Blockbuster will have a video download service through an acquisition and offers in store exchanges which are nice but the downloads aren't a real offer now so I just signed-up with Netflix figuring that if the movies take too long in the mail that I could watch stuff through some crazy computer-tv hook-up. So I signed-up for Netflix this week and I already have three movies and tested the online downloads with my new super fast FIOS Internet connection. So they never permanently lost me as a customer. I can't say the same is true of the BSC folks. I eagerly await the better managed business model for a gym/fitness club to eat their lunch (probably salad).

Now my main issue is NESN. I don't mind that NESN owns the rights to broadcast the games but it is silly that I can't watch NESN broadcast games on my computer no matter what I might want to do. I don't want to buy a cable package so that I can watch the Red Sox lose to the Yankees in New York (well I'm cynical after the last two games) but in general I should be able to buy the game online somehow. MLB.com would let me do so IF I lived in Texas. But I live in Boston, which is why I am a RED SOX FAN.... so I am urging the folks at NESN to think about their business model and come-up with a way to service the younger generation, the folks who hate cable and love the Internet, to capture a younger audience in Boston and make some money off of serving them. I don't mind paying for baseball. I just don't want to pay for other crap that I don't want along with it and the folks at NESN's marketing department are free to quote me on it.

So I've closed the books on a long chapter in Brookline without a lot of tearful emotions despite feeling like I am losing city life but am giddy with the new start in Newton and doing things like watering the lawn.