In today’s news, Governor Cuomo has announced guidelines for reopening gyms, and I just gotta say that these guidelines are a joke. As with some of the other guidelines put out in recent history for other industries like manufacturing and restaurants, these guidelines seem like their sole purpose is to have small businesses hemorrhage money, whereby the owners find themselves unable to turn a profit and end up shutting down.
Ok let’s get into what these guidelines look like here in the WGRZ article:
• Maximum 33% capacity, which is even less than restaurants, which have 50%
• Masks must be worn at all times when exercising
• HVAC systems → Cuomo must have some investments in some bigger name HVAC companies or something; another item that gyms have to pay for
• Sign-ins for future contact tracing, if implemented.
Now, let’s have a look at the WKBW article. It’s mainly the same but one thing I want to note is that business owners need to be more willing to stick up for themselves and not bend over backwards. It was Atilla’s Gym in NJ, where in the past month or so the gym owners had opened up their gym despite executive order not to do so, gotten their business license revoked, and got arrested all because they cared that much for their business.
It’s like the old expression: “when someone says jump, they say “how high””. I will say so that this business and the other business made the right move though in having outdoor areas for workouts. Frankly, in a state like this with such draconian business-killing measures put in place to this day, I feel that outdoor donation-based classes are the workouts of the future, because I can assure you that I won’t be going to a gym if I have to wear a mask, but I would go to an outdoor workout class where I don’t. Even if the governor put in place a so-called “mandate”, I still wouldn’t wear a mask outside.
Now let’s dive into the juicy part about all of this. Now people might see this whole move from Cuomo as him finally coming around to opening the gyms like every other business, but I see things differently. With the amount of hypocrisy coming from Cuomo’s authoritarian decision-making the past few months, which ultimately have threatened and demolished local businesses needlessly, I believe there is a different reason why Cuomo has done an about-face on this issue.
Specifically, this reason comes in the form of a class action lawsuit from 1,500 gyms from NYS, which was filed about a week ago. It’s interesting that no local news media covered it-- we need to change this in the future.