A Peloton customer may feel the same way about an expensive bike that someone who has paid for a SoulCycle class feels about skipping a session
A still from That Peloton Ad. Photo: Peloton One of the frequent refrains I heard during the controversy over That Peloton Ad was “who pays $2,000 for an exercise bike?” But of course, you can say this about all sorts of ways people exercise.
Lots of fitness spending is aimed at overcoming problems of intertemporal choice: We wish we had exercised yesterday, and we want to exercise tomorrow, and yet we often choose not to exercise right now and proceed to regret that choice the next day. Products and services that bring our current actions into line with our past and future preferences can be very valuable, even if they don’t seem strictly necessary for the actual practice of exercise.
But this strategy of upfront financial commitment is not foolproof. Unlimited monthly gym memberships are supposed to help us work out more, because we don’t pay at the margin the more times we go. Yet a 2006 paper in the American Economic Review found members at one network of American health clubs paid over $70 a month to work out just 4.3 times on average — spending more than if they had paid the $10 single-visit fee each time they went.
An alternative to financial accountability is interpersonal accountability. This is what That Peloton Ad was supposed to be about: A customer, using her expensive new piece of equipment to form and stick to a positive new habit, and demonstrating to those around her that she was doing so. Of course, this could be read in a creepy way: That her husband, whom the Internet decided was abusive, was pressuring her to work out or else, even though she was already thin.
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