Let that sink in. Seventy-five dollars for your friend to use a treadmill for two hours.

As one local member put it, reacting to the news: "I take a guest with me every month just to work out, not even to the pool area or tennis/pickleball courts. We don't spend more than 2 hours there. It's nice to have a girlfriend to workout with and then go for brunch."

Now that monthly tradition comes with a $900-per-year surcharge — up from $300. For context, that's more than some people pay for their own gym membership at plenty of perfectly decent facilities around the city.

Look, Bay Club is a private business and can charge whatever the market will bear. That's how it should work. Nobody has a right to affordable guest passes at a luxury fitness club. But this is worth talking about because it reflects a broader pattern in San Francisco's service economy: companies testing just how much they can squeeze from captive, affluent customer bases.

Bay Club already charges premium membership rates. The guest fee isn't really about covering costs — it's a demand management tool dressed up as a price adjustment. They'd rather you not bring guests, especially in summer when the pools and courts get crowded. Instead of being transparent about capacity limits, they're using price as a gate.

The honest move would be to just say: "We're limiting guest visits during peak season." Instead, they've chosen the route that also happens to pad revenue.

Private business, private rules. But members who are paying top dollar deserve straight talk, not a quiet email hiking fees by triple right before swimsuit season. If you don't like it, the most powerful thing you can do is exactly what the free market intended — take your money somewhere else.