Every time a national chain announces its coming to town, the same question and debate breaks out: Where should you spend your money? Does choosing affordability make you a bad neighbor? This week’s debate came courtesy of Planet Fitness landing in the plaza that used to house the Geneva Movieplex. And I’m old enough to remember the frustration when that theater closed. People pleaded for the community to “save it,” as if the economics of running a movie theater as the market shrunk were somehow optional.
The underlying issue then is the same now. People make decisions based on their actual circumstances, not on a theoretical vision of how their dollars should be spent.
That’s why the shaming baked into these conversations is particularly frustrating. Supporting local businesses is undeniably good for a community. But pretending that everyone can afford to spend two or three times as much to do it isn’t. It’s wishful thinking. In Ontario County, the median household income sits around $79,800, just below the statewide average. On paper that looks comfortable. In practice, families are still budgeting every dollar. They’re choosing between groceries, gas, utilities, and whatever remains after rent or a mortgage payment.
So, when someone picks a $15 gym membership over one that costs double or triple, that’s not a moral failing. It’s a rational response to an economic reality.
This is where “lived experience” matters. Some people can pay a premium to support a local business without thinking twice. But expecting everyone else to do the same — or guilt-tripping them when they don’t — ignores the everyday pressures their neighbors face. It doesn’t create stronger local businesses. It doesn’t correct market forces. And it certainly doesn’t change the math for the next entrepreneur debating whether to open something in that community.
If anything though, debates like the one that unfolded this week operate as free market research. The takeaway isn’t complicated: Businesses that fall into the “want” category — gyms or specialty retail for example — have a limited viable customer base in most Upstate towns. Only about 25% of Americans hold a gym membership at all, according to recent industry estimates. And among those who do, nearly half pay less than $25 a month — meaning the demand for premium-priced fitness options is thinner than realize. A gym membership may not be a luxury, but for many households, it’s still a discretionary purchase. And discretionary spending is the first thing squeezed when budgets tighten.
That’s why the purity test around “support local” feels so disconnected from how people actually live. It’s hard to lecture residents about choosing corporations when the infrastructure of daily life already depends on them. In most communities around the Finger Lakes, the local business ecosystem is anchored to Walmart, Wegmans, Tops, Aldi, Target, Home Depot, or Lowes — whichever big-box cluster is within a half-hour’s drive. Avoiding corporations would require rewriting how you get food, clothing, medicine, and essential goods. Almost no one has that option.
More importantly, if we’re serious about the future of local businesses, gyms are the wrong battlefield. A $15 Planet Fitness membership isn’t what’s dragging small businesses down in Upstate New York. The deeper problem is that we’ve all but lost locally owned grocery stores, hardware stores, and pharmacies — the kinds of businesses that actually sustain a small-town economy. The data backs this up, too. When a dollar store or big-chain competitor enters a rural area, independent groceries can see sales fall by 9% or more, a significantly sharper drop than in urban communities. That kind of pressure — not a low-cost gym — is what hollows out an economy.
A locally owned grocery store anchors a community. It circulates money locally in a way no national corporation will. It drives foot traffic. It creates economic clustering — the conditions that help coffee shops, boutiques, service providers, and independent shops survive. A gym doesn’t do that. A coffee shop doesn’t do that. Most service-sector amenities don’t do that. They’re valuable, but they’re not engines of local economic strength.
So when we frame the stakes as “Planet Fitness vs. Any Local Gym,” we’re missing the plot. The real question isn’t whether a national gym chain will sink local fitness options. It won’t. Every gym serves a different audience, and the market will sort itself out. The real question is why communities like ours have been reduced to defending narrow slices of the service economy while the core needs of daily life — food, hardware, medicine — are dominated entirely by corporations with no local ties.
If we want a community where local businesses thrive, we need an economic landscape where they can compete in the categories that matter. That means confronting the structural realities that wiped out locally owned essential-goods businesses long before a national gym arrived. Until then, people choosing the cheaper fitness membership aren’t the problem. They’re responding to the world as it is. And the sooner we stop shaming them for acting accordingly, the sooner we can start talking honestly about what a sustainable local economy actually looks like — in the Finger Lakes, in Upstate New York, and in small towns across the country.
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Last week: Why the ‘good old days’ aren’t coming back without new neighbors
If you missed my last column, it digs into another uncomfortable truth about local economies — one that matters just as much to the gym debate as it does to empty storefronts. We keep blaming costs, taxes, or Albany for business closures, but the real story is simpler: Too few people, too much resistance to growth, and a decades-long refusal to build the housing that would actually keep communities alive. If you want the deeper context for why small towns struggle to sustain the businesses they love, you should read this one next.
