Millennials spending big on trendy places to sweat
Generation snubs low-cost gyms for boutique experiences.
Carla Zuniga is punching a heavy bag as if she were preparing for a title fight, although she’s a 35-year-old hair stylist doing her regular workout.
Zuniga isn’t sweating at some low-fee, big-box fitness chain. Prevail Boxing is a 1,500-square-foot studio in Los Angeles that charges $250 for 10 classes.
“I think people in my generation are more willing to invest in what challenges them and makes them healthy,” said Zuniga, who grew bored with cheaper, traditional gyms. “It’s expensive to be healthy, but it’s more expensive to be sick.”
Costly coffee and artisanal avocado toast may be getting the blame for millennials’ inability to afford a house. But those expenses pale in comparison with what a growing segment is willing to spend on fitness, abandoning $30-a-month gyms for trendy studios where classes for cycling, boot camp or yoga can run $30 a session.
Boutique fitness studios have become the only growth segment in an otherwise stagnant gym industry, according to separate research reports from the Association of Fitness Studios, fitness technology firm Netpulse and financial services firm Stephens.
“When it comes to the younger generation, consumer items like car and home purchases are at an all-time low,” said Greg Skloot, vice president for growth at Netpulse, a San Francisco company that creates mobile apps for health clubs.
“They don’t want an annual gym membership commitment and a contract,” said Skloot, who co-wrote a recent report on fitness industry changes titled “The Club of 2020.” “They want to be able to make physical fitness choices on demand, and they are willing to pay for it.”
Spurred by popular start-up ClassPass and other online middlemen, young fitness addicts say their days of mindless treadmill workouts tied to just one gym are over. With a limited number of spots per class and advance reservations generally required, there’s a mad rush to get into the hottest classes.
Rules can be strict where studios have waiting lists of a dozen or more people who are hoping someone doesn’t show up for a class so that they can slip into the spot.
At Prevail Boxing, for example, cancellations with less than eight hours’ notice cost $10 on top of the price of the class. Fail to show and there’s a $20 fee.
Arrive less than five minutes early and you stand a chance of losing your class spot to someone else.
People sign up as early as two weeks in advance for a coveted spot with a sought-after trainer such as Cycle House’s Nichelle Hines, whose title is chief ride officer.
Some instructors and owners have become celebrities, with reality TV shows and hundreds of thousands of Instagram followers.
Bart Kwan, 33, has 472,000 Instagram followers and 674,000 YouTube subscribers. Kwan regularly posts comedy and power-lifting workout videos that garner more than 1 million views each. Kwan’s “Justkiddingnews” YouTube channel has nearly 1.7 million subscribers.
Kwan said he wanted to re-create the atmosphere he once found in a mixed martial arts training facility.
“We were paying top dollar to go there,” Kwan said, “but we considered that place our temple.”
Grid Vongpiansuksa tried Kwan’s Barbell Brigade in Los Angeles in 2014 and came back for the support.
“Sure, it’s expensive,” the 22-year-old said, “but in an environment like this, people are encouraging you, so it becomes you investing in the best you can be.”
Boutique fitness studios mix small-group camaraderie and dojo-like commitment with coconut water and their own branded merchandise, such as Barbell Brigade’s line of Dominate Humbly products and attire.
Instead of the professional athlete and bodybuilder photos that line the walls of some traditional gyms, there are selfie walls perfect for the Instagram-obsessed.
Skloot and other experts say the social aspect partially explains the willingness to pay so much more than at a traditional gym. Millennials may be ready to forgo an alternative social activity — going out for dinner and drinking and dancing, for example — where the cost can easily run $100 or more.
“You see your friends at the gym,” Zuniga said, “and the next morning you don’t wake up feeling awful. You wake up feeling great.”
At Cycle House, which specializes in demanding cycling classes, it’s not unusual to see members lingering outside in the courtyard and at the adjacent coffee shop. But the difficulty of the classes is the real draw, said Peter Marcos, a customer who liked Cycle House so much he quit his tech job to work there.
Amazon.com’s extraordinary growth has turned Seattle into the biggest company town in America.
Amazon now occupies 19 percent of all prime office space in the city, the most for any employer in a major U.S. city, according to an analysis conducted for The Seattle Times.
Amazon’s presence in Seattle is more than twice as large that of as any other company in any other big U.S. city, and the e-commerce giant’s expansion here is just getting started.
The swarms of young workers crowding into the South Lake Union neighborhood every morning represent an urban campus that is unparalleled in the United States — and they have helped transform Seattle, for better or worse. Amazon’s rapid rise has fueled an economy that has driven up wages and lowered unemployment, but also produced clogged traffic on the roads and sky-high housing prices.
And while Seattle’s booming economy is often attributed to a wide variety of factors, increasingly, it’s all about one company.
Amazon now occupies more office space than the city’s next 40 biggest employers combined.
And that’s only the beginning: Its 8.1 million square feet in Seattle is expected to soar to more than 12 million within five years.
Amazon’s supremacy in e-commerce and cloud computing has translated, locally, into an avalanche of glass, steel, people and money. It’s given Seattle more prominence as a magnet for talent from all over the world, and reshaped formerly forlorn parts of the city into vibrant live-workand-play neighborhoods.
The company’s unparalleled impact in determining Seattle’s fortunes may give some pause to those who experienced the downturn of the 1970s, when the shine of “Jet City” was tarnished as Boeing cut about two-thirds of its huge local workforce.
“Seattle’s been through this before,” said Tracey Seslen, a professor at the University of Washington’s Foster School of Business. “If Amazon were to leave, that would create a giant hole in their wake.”
However, unlike Boeing, whose local operations focus on the single business of building airplanes, Amazon runs a vast web of mutually reinforcing but diverse businesses ––selling computing power, retailing nearly everything, publishing books and producing films, among other things.
John Schoettler, Amazon’s director of real estate, says that all he’s experienced in his nearly two decades at Amazon is “steady, continued growth,” the result of the company’s zealous focus on satisfying customers.
The legacy of what so far amounts to $4 billion spent by the company on real estate here will be long-lasting, he said: “These buildings will stand for hundreds of years.”
Amazon’s expansion has led, in the short time since the end of the recession, to a “record level of private investment,” as well as significant levels of public infrastructure investment, according to John Scholes, CEO of the Downtown Seattle Association.
However, Amazon has become the go-to scapegoat for people complaining about Seattle’s problems associated with growth, like housing prices and clogged streets. And while it’s certainly not the only reason Seattle is bursting at the seams, Amazon makes up a disproportionate share of the city’s rapid growth.
Apartment rents this year are 63 percent higher than in 2010, as Seattle has become the fastest-growing city in the country.
Home costs are rising faster here than anywhere else in the nation, and have doubled in the past five years, pushing the middle class to surrounding, less expensive towns.