“Even as people increasingly shopped, dated, and worked online, fitness seemed like a final frontier of the IRL economy: It’s why big-box gyms were the last hope as anchor tenants for dying malls.”
Gyms, long heralded as the “final frontier of the IRL economy,” were among the first businesses to shut down due to the pandemic, wrote Natalia Mehlman Petrzela in Marker. Now, with a third surge of Covid-19 infections, the survival of the brick-and-mortar fitness industry hangs in the balance, despite trying everything from outdoor classes to plexiglass-encased treadmills.
According to the International Health, Racquet, and Sportsclub Association, roughly 1 in 4 of the nation’s 40,000 to 50,000 gyms will close their doors for good — “a sobering and sudden reversal of decades of uninterrupted, inevitable growth in brick-and-mortar fitness, valued at more than $30 billion earlier this year.”
But with several viable vaccine candidates on the way, could a wave of pent-up demand save the gyms? “Between all the stress baking and sheltering at home, many Americans have put on the Quarantine 15,” Mehlman Petrzela writes. “Others miss both the community — or the alone time — they once found at the gym, as much as the calorie burn.”
