Patrons, who sign up as much for the prestige as the workouts, pay $900 per month to learn her Tracy Anderson Method – a dance-based workout in a room heated to 95 degrees with 75 per cent humidity.
… [O]n top of their hefty monthly membership costs there is also a fee to reserve a mat for the summer – which essentially allows people to save their favorite spots in class.
[I]n 2018 the price was already a hefty $3,000 but, as of this year, it has risen to a staggering $5,500.
… [Employees’] bodies were pushed to ‘breaking’ point with the level of intensity demanded from [them], with the heat of the studios also leaving them ‘exhausted and dehydrated.’
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UD notes that one popular way to differentiate/massively overprice yourself in postmodern American markets is via deadly perversion. You take a straightforward location/experience (workout studio, restaurant, coffee shop, tourism outing) and you utterly psychotically fuck it up so it might poison your clients or give them heat stroke or bankrupt them or generate homicidally competitive self-display. (See David Brooks on “dial-an-ordeal.”) People won’t tolerate your insane jacking up of the price unless you make them feel they’re in a sudden unforeseen windstorm on Everest that’s going to kill them.