The price we borrowed from fashion

Posted on: 7 October 2026

For some time now I have been hearing a question in the box that nobody put to me for years, which is why it costs so much more than an ordinary gym. I opened my first box in Lugano in July 2013, when CrossFit was the thing to be doing and people signed the membership form without looking too hard at the figure, so what struck me was mostly how late the question has arrived. Those who ask it are right to ask and the fault is mine, because I did not answer while nobody was asking.

While something is in fashion its price works as a badge, since it tells other people where you train and with whom. Nobody compares a badge with anything, because it is worth only what others recognise in it. In those years the member paid for belonging and the training came along with it. Then the fashion moved on, or rather the standing of the product slipped as newer rivals such as Hyrox took the attention, which left whoever stayed holding a monthly figure with no badge attached. At that point they did what anyone does with a price they cannot read, which is to go looking for a comparison. They found it in the category they had always filed us under. The gym.

We in the trade have always refused that word. We say box, which comes from the garages and industrial units where it all started, yet for thirteen years the member has gone home saying "I'm off to the gym" and we let it pass.

The reference price is set by the category the customer puts you in, whatever your costs happen to be. If in their head you are a gym, your membership is measured against the twenty-four-hour budget chain by the retail park and everything above that figure becomes a premium you have to justify.

In 2008 Hilke Plassmann and Antonio Rangel, then at Caltech, had volunteers taste wine inside an MRI scanner and told them a price each time. The same wine, presented once at $10 and once at $90, was liked better at $90 and activity in the brain areas tied to pleasure rose with the tag. Price manufactures part of the experience, then, at least for as long as the drinker believes what they have been told. Fashion does the same, because while the customer believes in it the training seems worth what they pay. When the belief goes they are back to tasting the wine without the label and all that counts is whether anybody ever taught them how to taste.

The comparison with the gym hides something simpler, which is that the two figures buy different products. Stefano DellaVigna and Ulrike Malmendier followed 7,752 members of three American health clubs for three years and in 2006 published the results in the American Economic Review under the title "Paying Not to Go to the Gym". Those who had chosen the monthly contract at over $70 turned up on average 4.3 times a month and so paid more than $17 a visit, when a ten-visit pass would have cost them $10 a time. The paper opens with an entry from Bridget Jones's diary, in which she divides the cost of her annual membership by the one visit she has made so far that year.

A subscription gym sells access and can generally hold its price because it sells far more memberships than the floor could ever hold at once. A box sells attendance, meaning a class with a fixed number of places and a coach watching how you move, so every member who turns up is a cost and when one is missing it shows straight away. The first earns when you stay away. The second costs because you turn up. The customer sets one figure above the other and sees only that one of them is higher.

The mistake belongs to the trade and I count myself in. For years we collected a price that fashion was justifying on our behalf and we never spent an hour explaining what was inside it, since nobody was asking and explaining felt almost like talking ourselves down. It was a loan. Now that it falls due we find ourselves arguing about price with people we never equipped to weigh the answer, so whatever we say today sounds like a man defending his price list.

I was turning this over the other morning on the way to the supermarket, facing the usual choice between the own-label product and the branded one beside it, when I asked myself who exactly guarantees that the dearer one is the better one. Nobody does. It is the same question my members are putting to me, except that in the aisle I am the one without the tools and whoever set that price is counting on my not acquiring them.

I do not know how many of those now arguing will stay once they have understood the difference. I do know that explaining it today costs more than it would have in 2013, when it would have been enough to say it to people who were not asking.