The Remarkable Indirect Impact of Amazon Prime Day

After a long winter and spring, it's finally summer! Not long ago, Americans everywhere were coming off the holiday season and vowing to get beach-ready by heading back into the local gym. That means people should be well on their way to those beach bodies they resolved to develop as part of their New Year's resolutions, right? Knowing that losing weight is one of the most common resolutions people make at the start of a New Year, I had a hunch that there would be a spike in gym traffic after the holidays. But that also left me wondering, would it sustain? Taking a look at some comparative analysis across the leading fitness center chains in the US (Planet Fitness, LA Fitness, Gold's Gym, and 24Hour Fitness), the answers started to become clear… As I suspected, each fitness chain saw a healthy increase of gym-goers immediately following January 1st. That is, right after those New Year's resolutions were made and everyone was ready to go, people started to hit the gym. However, looking at the data, there were differences between the various chains. Planet Fitness was able to drive 13% more foot traffic than the closest competitor. The question then becomes, why? What was it about Planet Fitness that set it ahead of the other fitness centers and drove even more foot traffic? When we begin to take initial fees, monthly fees, and contract lengths into account, the difference becomes clear and we can start to understand why. Planet Fitness offers the most customer-friendly package of all the major gym brands. Customers do not have to pay any initial fees, do not have to sign any minimum contract, and only pay $10/month, almost completely eliminating any risk involved in signing up. If we go a step further and layer this foot-traffic data against the membership rates, we can estimate how companies were impacted, as demonstrated in the following table. Even at the lowest price point, Planet Fitness more than made up their price difference with volume in foot-traffic/new member visits, resulting in the most significant overall increase. The question then becomes, how motivated are these gym-goers following January 1st? Are these increases sustained throughout the year, or do they taper off with time, as resolutions fall by the wayside? In looking at a full five months afterwards, it seems gym visitors lose their motivation by the end of March. At that point, we start to see steady decreases in gym visits across the board. Looking at the data, Planet Fitness enjoyed the greatest initial increase but then lost 73.23% of those gains by the end of March. Gold's Gym also jumped out to a 31.45% initial gain, but those gains were completely negated three months later.