Have you read what Peloton has done to their customers? If you bought a Peloton treadmill, at a cost of about $4,000, you can no longer use that treadmill for ANYTHING if you don’t also buy a $40/month subscription to the Peloton Treadmill Community.

You heard me right. Peloton is using the treadmill’s connectivity to LOCK. IT. DOWN. You can’t run or walk on it. It becomes an expensive coat rack. It won’t even turn on. And that’s what they’re doing to their customers who have bought their treadmills, wanting to be part of the lifestyle brand, but don’t want to pay $40 per month to join the inner circle.

(I think Peloton is a cult, by the way.)

Is this a trend? Companies saying “screw you” to their customers? And when the customers protest they just laugh and say, “because we can.”

I’m not talking about the normal tradeoffs. “We could make the safest car ever to take to the road, but the extra armor would reduce gas mileage to 1.5 mpg.” This is not that.

Which reminds me of my current grievance. I do not like the new editor on WordPress, “Gutenberg”. And hallelujah! there is a plugin that returns you to the old editor, Classic, which looks like MS Word. Easy, familiar, intuitive.

But to install the plugin that will let me return to the classic editor means upgrading to a higher level of WordPress, which would cost an additional $300 per year.

Like Peloton, WordPress is saying,

We will give you what you want, and you will like it.

WordPress.

And beatings will continue until morale improves.

(Ok, this has been a bit tongue-in-cheek. But still, …)