#589 Grunt

So I’m at my club—excuse me, “fitness center”—and I’m ruminating about the way they introduce ideas to guests.
You’ve seen two of the new advertising approaches to print media—busboards and temporary stick-up signs along the road. They’re intended to do for the print media what radio already does for electronic media.
Provide low cost ways to repeat your message redundantly over and over again.
Repetition builds recognition.
My club is trying a similar approach. They post these little signs all over the club in places where you are likely to see them. Bulletin boards, wall space, whatever.
Recently they’ve even installed little plastic sign holders...over the urinal.
Not too long ago, one sign that I couldn’t help but read as I stood there, um, contemplating world peace, was an admonition that it was polite—and required—for club users to use workout towels when using the club’s machines.
It didn’t specify whether it was to look cool with them draped around your neck, like the impossibly buff sample patrons in the poster’s picture, or to use them to wipe up the real pools of sweat the rest of us schleppers leave behind on said machines. The mini-poster then went on to say workout towels were available to purchase at the front desk.
How convenient.
I wondered at the time if the urinal qualified as a club machine.
Recently the peepee-poster said that my club was hiring friendly, reliable, and outgoing people.
I reflected that at that point I was indeed outgoing.
But what really caught my attention were the positions they were hoping to hire for. They were Fitness Host, Personal Trainer and Porter.
I thought it was cool they used a turn of the new century word, Fitness Host, with a turn of the last century word, Porter.
Is anyone a porter any more? What does a porter do? They carry stuff for people, right? Is there as lot of stuff to carry for people in a health club?
And if there is, wouldn’t it be a good, um, “work out” for them to carry it themselves?
I think they call that by another old-fashioned word—exercise.
America ya gotta love it