MUKILTEO, Wash. — Employees and clients at a North Sound gym showed up for work and their workouts to find it closed, permanently. They said they had no warning and some have paid hundreds of dollars up front for membership.
The gym owner blames the building owner and the building owner blames the gym owner, but the people who used Mukilteo Athletic Club don’t care who is at fault—they just want their money back.
“Come for my lunch break, get my run in,” Kendall Barnett, who we met outside the empty club Wednesday morning, told us. Instead the only exercise she got was from her car to the door—where she found a sign that reads “Sorry, the gym is closed!”
That was it-- no warning, no explanation.
Aaron Blackburn was also in the parking lot. He works for another gym.
“I’ve had about 10 people come in and say ‘Hey we don’t have a membership anymore,’” he told us.
He was at the Mukilteo Athletic Club Wednesday hoping to ease the pain of the closure with a discounted membership at his gym.
A lot of customers said they are interested, but they also want answers. So we called the gym owner and met with him at his house.
He wouldn’t talk to us on camera, but he blamed the building owner—Robinson Group out of Everett. He said he and the landlord are in a dispute over money so he refused to pay rent in January and February and was evicted.
That’s right around the time Dennis Luong—ironically—left Aaron’s gym for Mukilteo Athletic Club.
“I got a better deal. They gave me $10 off a month to pay up front in full for two memberships,” Dennis said. It cost him $360.
“I’m pretty concerned that I’m not going to get my money back,” he told us. When we asked the owner about it, he admitted he didn’t know whether Dennis and other customers would be refunded.
We called Robinson Group in Everett. They said they had to evict the owner and they put up the closed signs and secured the doors when he didn’t do it himself.
Cox Media Group
