Gym owners petition city mask mandate
The new directive has decreased membership
Fitness club owners around Boston are pleading with local officials to lift indoor mask mandates during workouts, insisting the requirement has hurt an industry already decimated by the pandemic.
“We’re all ticking time bombs, waiting for our money to run out,” said founder of btone FITNESS studios Jody Merrill.
Several workout entrepreneurs have banded together and started a petition against the mask mandate, collecting signatures to send to Boston Acting Mayor Kim Janey and Gov. Charlie Baker.
“Due to the increased difficulty in breathing while exercising, mask mandates hit our attendance more severely than any other industry,” the petition reads.
The business owners behind the petition polled their clients and found revenue and attendance has dropped 50% since 2019.
Operators like Becca Skudder, found of MyStryde fitness studios, said the return of the latest indoor mask mandate torpedoed attendance in classes at her Boston studios.
“The week after the mandate went into place, it was pretty obvious drop-off — around 20%,” she said.
An average of 2-5 clients quit Merrill’s gyms each day the mandate stays in effect, she told the Herald, citing the requirement to wear masks during workouts.
That’s hit her bottom line and made her worry about making rent and keeping her studios open.
“Every month, the end of the month is a struggle. There’s tears, arguments with landlords. We can’t close,” she said.
Gyms that survived the months-long shutdown at the beginning of the pandemic in spring 2020 had to get creative to bring back clients.
Fitness club owners invested in state-of-the-art cleaning devices and reorganized cardio floors to keep clients healthy.
Handle Bar spin studios, a collection of cycling gyms around Boston, even moved stationary bikes to an outdoor location in South Boston for clients uncomfortable with working out indoors.
After all that, when the indoor mask mandate lifted in May 2021, most gym owners thought they were safely out of the woods.
But the spread of the delta variant led officials to reinstate indoor mask mandates at the end of summer.
“All of the momentum that we built up, we were hoping it would carry us through the fall. But obviously the mask mandate has really set us back,” said Handle Bar director of operations Mary Arnold. “It’s been really tough.”
In the petition, gym owners want the option to “to have the ability to waive the mask mandate, if they a) require vaccinations or b) check vaccine cards and allow vaccinated customers to workout without masks, and non vaccinated customers to wear masks.”