Question-and-Answer Session
Operator
(Operator instructions). Your first question comes from the line of Scott Hamann with KeyBanc Capital. Please proceed.
Scott Hamann – KeyBanc Capital
Yes good morning. Just in terms of some of the things that you are doing on the retention initiatives Bahram, could you kind of give us some more detail of what was working throughout the year, what hasn’t been working, and how you’re going to address some of these issues going forward?
Bahram Akradi
Good question, Scott. Let me give you meaningful color where I can. Let me first start by telling you that I am extremely disappointed with our 10.6% attrition rate that we had in the Q3. So in a long shot, I can tell you things aren’t working at this stage in any shape or form where I would want to brag about.
We have a lot of initiatives in place. My gut feel tells me it is way too early, both from members, absorption, understanding of all these things that we are doing, whether if it has a real impact or not, and also our team members. So when I think about the impact that you are asking for none of the stuff we are working on I expect to see anything dramatic out of it till very end of this quarter, and hopefully for sure sometime in the first Q of 2010.
I have to tell you that in – and I have been sharing this with – as I have been able to talk in the public forums, business is as tough as I have every seen it in 20 some years. And I am sure some of the other people will have the same question, so I will just cover it here. In all the past recessions, I felt no impact in our business.
All we had to do is lower the initiative fee and we got the membership accounts, we were able to pull the people in by doing increased promotions, increased marketing. In this particular time, things are just not working. I mean we are – when we do advertise, we don’t see the impact that we would expect to get out of it. And so we are working on huge value proposition.
One of the things we are going to focus on take our in-center businesses and provide values to our members that it’s not available to our members and they couldn’t get those type of services elsewhere at those rates such as swim lessons, hair cut for kids, sandwiches that are totally healthy, but yet they are really low price.
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