They keep a huge majority of the fee - nearly seventy per cent - from the client and give not even close to half to the trainer!!! IF that isn't an American corporate beast acting out greed I don't know what is.
They make the trainer PAY for any external training courses, they won't even substitute any of the fee. They pay the external trainers as small a fee as they can get away with, so they trim back savings on both ends. The 'in-house' training that they shout so loudly about, is Powerpoint slides delivered by a trainer who is often far less qualified than the 'students' who are trying to get up to the next rank for a few extra pounds per hour.
They have you on a '0' hour contract, with an 'expectation' of doing 95hrs per month - another win win for Equinox. So they legally owe you no work, yet expect you to hit nearly 100 per month. If you do less sessions then you get slammed with hours of floor shifts every week, often at early mornings and up until 10pm at night (when you started at 6am it isn't cool) where you walk the floor like a zombie for minimum wage - no joke.
The Tier X system is very well branded but many of the trainers simply aren't qualified to do that level of work. They are shattered from years of working for Equinox to get to that level and frankly many of them you'll find in the staff room looking exhausted yet striving for the next pay cheque.
A trainer got cancer after working faithfully for the company for 5 years, regularly doing 140-160 per month (he looked beyond tired). The company gave him not 1 penny. Instead they endorsed having a whip around the clients and asked them to contribute for his living expenses for the year ahead. These clients have already put 10,000-20,000 pounds per year into purchased personal training - yep win win for Equinox again, they donated nothing.
They treat the trainers like meat, they drain them for all they're worth. Some working 7 days per week, of their own volition yes, but if they didn't they would make a pittance. If the trainers don't do more than 40 sessions in a two week period, they take ANOTHER thirty percent off of their pay.
