Policy - Exercise Energy Levy

Me First! has been undertaking the work of a consumer watchdog lately. We took a look at the food industry. They charge you for energy (in caloric form). They charge you per unit. You only pay for what you consume (thrown-away left-overs excepted). We then looked at the fitness industry. They charge you for taking energy away from you. They tend to charge you memberships of many months in which you may only use a fraction of the service they provide. So from your perspective there is a lot of wastage there if you find it difficult to get back to the gym regularly.

But what interested Me First! was what happens to the energy you do expend with them. Were they taking and storing that energy and then feeding it back into the electricity grid? Should they then have been giving that back to the consumer in the form of discounted membership rates? What we discovered shocked us more than the possibility that gyms were energy vampires leeching off the efforts of the image-concsious and charging them for the experience. The alarming truth is that all that energy expended on exercise machines is just evaporating into the ether! All this while we are a world with an energy crisis.

Now if the fitness industry was an energy vampire conning its costumers we would have been cool with that. Charging you money to take something from you that they can then use themselves? Brilliant! Such entrepreneurialism is to be admired. But to just let all that puffing and panting waft away while energy costs rise is a scandal and one that Me First! will respond to with an Exercise Energy Levy.

This levy will be set at a rate necessary to provide the fitness industry with the incentive it needs to implement technology improvements allowing them to convert every movement of every exercise machine into power to return to the electricity grid. If they do so they will make and even grow profits. If they continue as they are then they will suffer financially. Once this change takes effect it will be better for everyone. The industry will be taking from customers twice-over and those customers will be feeding our energy reserves as well as their own egos.