L.A. Fitness - Concerns about Customer Refunds!

I am not saying that L.A. fitness is a bad company... they do have great facilities. What I am saying is that refunds are apparently not processed in a timely fashion. I am going through my own difficulties with this process now following my signing an agreement allowing them to automatically bill my account each month.

In fact, one employee when pressed told me of a case where a customer had been billed for three years following their desire to cancel. I was told it was an ongoing problem for customers to get their money back. In fact automatic billing is the ONLY way you can become a member at L.A. Fitness which is by the way based in Newport Beach, California.

I was horrified when I got my membership in the mail even though I had exercised my right as a consumer to rescind the contract within a 72 hour "cooling off" period.
What really got my attention is that in bold print the membership reads:

Expiration: Endless

It will be one cold day before I ever give anyone access to automatically take money from my bank account again. In fact it is my opinion that you should almost NEVER allow yourself to be automatically billed for anything except perhaps life insurance due to the extreme nature of the commitment.
I just hope that somehow I can stop the next round of billing.
God help us all.