A few months ago, I signed up for a ClassPass trial. It was insanely cheap—five euros for a month—and I’ll try anything that stands a chance of getting me out of the house in February.
Naturally, I completely forgot about ClassPass for the following three weeks. Thanks to putting a week-early cancellation reminder in my agenda, I managed to visit one or two classes in my last week of the trial. After completely wasting the month, I took a look at the month-long pass prices, dropped down to a cheap subscription (twenty-five euros for the equivalent of five classes), and endeavored to give the app a proper try for the following month.
Over the next weeks, I actually lived up to my goal. I attended a qigong class on a day off and felt remarkably like a water bender. Two lunch breaks were spent in exercise classes near my office. I spent an evening going to a “techno bunker”–themed spinning class—this one really wasn’t for me, inducing claustrophobia instead of an endorphin high, but at least I hadn’t spent much on it. I tried every unique style of yoga that I came across—hatha, ashtanga, vinyasa, yin—for the fun of it, improving my downward-facing dog and my bike riding form in the process (“rotate your elbows forward and push into the center of your back,” instead of simply collapsing into your shoulderblades and/or handlebars).
It was a ton of fun, and I was getting a great deal, which made it even more fun. One neighborhood gym I was visiting sold a pack of ten classes for more than double what I was paying per class—€12.50 versus €5. Wow, I thought on my way home, slowly coming back to myself after an extended shavasana, what a steal.
By the time my final-week reminder showed up in my agenda, a seed of doubt began to take root, prompted by my own boasting to a friend about my great deal. How was it possible that I was paying so little for classes compared to buying them directly? What kind of business-to-business offer was ClassPass offering to these gyms that made this work? Perhaps a decent payout to gyms is cross-subsidized by subscribers who aren’t actually using the service?
Checking ClassPass’s website, their business model seemed feasible enough. “Valorize your empty spots,” their offer went, “and make a bit of money instead of nothing by connecting with our customers.” Plus, ClassPass customers will discover your gym and you’ll have the chance to convert them to regulars! Not a bad pitch, but I still had questions. When I started searching these questions (especially followed by “Reddit”), I saw the other side of the story. Some gyms and studios were getting paid out as little as €3 per visitor and noted other problems, including being unable to control how many “seats” would go to these low-paying ClassPass users.
What I read made me pause and ask myself if I actually wanted to renew my subscription, as I’d been planning to do. I had approximately six days to solve this moral dilemma.
On one hand, I thought at first, no one had forced these gyms to sign up to ClassPass. The owners could always stop using the platform if it was no longer economically interesting to them. I am not responsible for the business decisions of these gym and studio owners; and I was seeing my yoga practice improve; and I have my own budget to worry about, after all. The problem crossed my mind in the middle of a series of sun salutations the next day. I felt bad about it, but my own economic interest had still driven me back to the discounted class.
A few days later, though—probably on a Sunday, when I’d slowed down enough in my routines for critical thinking skills to kick in—I had a revelation. In my mind, I was paying for workout classes, and I’d just found a way to get a discount on them. In reality, though, what I was paying for was access to a platform that is creating very little actual added value but has a good enough marketing team to convince struggling small businesses that it can offer a meaningful solution. ClassPass can offer classes so cheaply because it is not actually providing classes. I was paying little because I was not actually paying for the classes, nor for the labor and facility costs that go into them. I was paying to generate shareholder revenue for ClassPass and give a token compensation to the yoga instructors and studios who are providing the service I am supposedly purchasing through it.
What ClassPass is doing, in fact, is engaging in classic rent-seeking behavior through the new model of platform capitalism. This approach is all around us. Businesses employing this strategy are providing very little actual added value to a sector—be it the music industry, vacation accommodation, or fitness—and are instead simply redirecting existing wealth to themselves. Instead of paying an artist or a label to buy their CD and listen to their music, you subscribe to Spotify. Instead of paying a hotel, you pay Booking.com. The platform then takes a large cut for some basic software provision and simultaneously gets free access to your data.
So in the end, I may have found a cheaper option for my immediate economic interest, but it wasn’t actually such a good deal. The good news is that rentiership works better with a monopoly, which ClassPass does not yet have. My shavasanas come more expensively now, but I am paying my instructor directly for her work. My leisure should not, in fact, be a “steal.”
Image credit: Diego M. Rivera, Detroit Industry Murals, 1932-1933, frescoes. Detroit Institute of Arts, Gift of Edsel B. Ford, 33.10.
Rylan Shewmaker (‘21) calls herself a geographer, though none of her degrees substantiate this. After growing up in Texas and studying in Grand Rapids, she moved to Brussels, Belgium, for her master’s degree in urban studies. She still lives in Brussels and works for a housing non-profit. She enjoys audiobooks, bike commuting, sunny days, and learning new things.
