Pros
The facilities ARE really nice, so the free membership is a bonus (granted, you can only use the gym/facilities during "off-peak" hours--so no mornings or evenings--but it's still a plus). Most of the staff at my club were great to work with. Unfortunately, most of them didn't stick around for long . . . but I enjoyed working with them while they lasted! In house education is very good compared to other gyms. And you DO get paid ($8/hr) to attend in house classes . . . that seemed to me to be a pretty nice deal. You can swap services with other employees (massage, spa, personal training, etc.). If you are going to work as a personal trainer in a fitness center or gym, I suppose Equinox is probably the way to go. There are a lot of gyms out there that are MUCH scummier than Equinox.
Cons
-Expect to live at Equinox. The pay is awful. When you take into account the fact that Equinox requires you to spend countless hours each day working unpaid to "build your business", review class material with managers, attend "mandatory" meetings, take tests, etc., you are getting paid FAR below minimum wage. Floor shifts pay a measly $8 an hour. You can make some okay money once you pick up some clients (and drop the floor shifts), but PT is so expensive at Equinox that it is extremely difficult to get clients to commit long-term. The hours can be horrible and obnoxiously irregular. I've known individuals who have been assigned a floor shift until close (11 p.m.) one day . . . only to have to turn around and open the gym the next morning at 5:15. It seems the managers do not take these things into account and/or care when scheduling the floor shifts. If you happen to find a client who wants to train at a time that coincides with your floor shift, and you can't find anyone to cover for you (the managers will not help you find someone, by the way. It's completely up to you), you are basically S.O.L. The floor shift ALWAYS takes priority. Really?! Because it seems to me that this practice is actually LOSING money for Equinox. But I guess nobody asked me. Both of my managers left something to be desired, but one of my managers was particularly disorganized and completely unreliable. She screwed me over on countless occasions by messing up scheduling, "forgetting" to tell me things necessary to do my job and/or be promoted, failing to turn in my time-sheets in order for me to get paid, dragging her feet to take care of things, scheduling (unpaid, of course) "mandatory" meetings and then telling me she needed to reschedule after I'd already shown up to the gym, etc. She left Equinox, so maybe whoever replaced her is better . . . but management at my club was a disaster from day one. Trainers are treated pretty poorly. We make ridiculous amounts of money for Equinox, but they don't do anything to ensure our well-being and/or job satisfaction. When I first started, I had an AMAZINGLY brilliant and uber-experienced Tier-III trainer call me up, begging me to let her cover my floor shift. It turned out that a couple of her clients were on vacation that week, and she was posed to fall below the number of hours necessary to be considered "full-time" by ONE HOUR. If she didn't make that hour up somehow (i.e. a floor shift), she would lose her health insurance benefits. I felt so badly for her . . . she was desperate, to say the least. I realized right then and there that if they would throw away this girl's health insurance after ONE WEEK of dropping ONE HOUR below full-time (after she had put in years of hard work and earned them oodles of money), it wasn't a place I wanted to be for long. That being said, the attrition rate of employees is VERY high. People are constantly coming and going. This makes it very tough to ever really get to a place where work feels "comfortable", if that makes sense. **If you are thinking about working as a personal trainer for Equinox, I will give you the same advice I was given by a Tier-III trainer on my first day of work: "Use Equinox as a stepping stone. Learn all you can from everyone around you . . . and then move on to bigger and better things. Do not allow yourself to get stuck at Equinox."