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It's one of the industry's eternal struggles – how do we get beyond the UK's gym membership penetration level of 15 per cent and reach out to the 85 per cent of the population who currently don't have a membership of a fitness facility?
The needle has been stuck for longer than most of us care to remember and, try as it might, so far the sector has failed to shift the numbers.
One solution, which various operators and organisations – including ukactive – have tested in the past is collaborating with what some might say are more risky partners, such as Coca Cola and Danone, rather than obvious sports brands and health insurance companies, who many feel only reach those who are already active.
Most recently, fitness marketplace, Hussle, partnered with fast food giant McDonald's for its annual Monopoly giveaway, as the company was keen to establish whether collaborations like these could enable fitness operators to access new customer bases.
We asked leading industry figures whether they believe it's 'worth it'. Can this tactic convert a whole new demographic to exercise? And does avoiding a direct association by using third party agents to broker the deal make it an effective strategy, smoothing the way for new user groups while maintaining the sector's reputation?
In my previous role within the confectionary industry, I helped candy become classified as an 'essential item' during the COVID-19 crisis, a classification the UK fitness sector didn't manage to achieve.
Why do I believe this was possible? You can't make friends in a time of crisis. The fitness industry needed to have longstanding relationships with lawmakers and government officials so that, when the crisis came, it knew who to call and they knew to answer the phone.
In the US, confectionery manufacturing is part of the nation's food system, which was obviously considered essential, so we made the argument that it would be more burdensome for the government to determine what types of foods should be on that essential list.
Some lawmakers suggested the confectionery sector take a voluntary pause in manufacturing – when that started to happen, we shifted our argument to say the nation was struggling, people in this industry needed their jobs as much as any other, and the products we sold brought a little joy and happiness to individuals who'd lost so much. We also partnered with the US government to provide PPE to front line workers, which earned some goodwill.
At IHRSA, we've now formed the Global Health and Fitness Alliance (GHFA) to bring industry leaders together to create policies and initiatives for the global fitness market and, ultimately, confirm our essential status. The GHFA aims to position fitness as a key contributor in the preventive healthcare continuum, promote our vital contributions to the health, wellbeing and prosperity of societies, plus facilitate credible third-party evidence-based research on the health benefits and economic contributions of this sector. I'm happy to report that IHRSA and GHFA have secured funding for a landmark research project on the global fitness sector with Deloitte that is currently underway and will be released early next year.
Part of the reason gyms weren't allowed to stay open is the perception that it's about vanity; sometimes you have to connect the dots for people. When it became clear that obesity makes people more susceptible to COVID-19, we needed to step up and push harder than ever to open.
Collaborations with fast food suppliers is an interesting concept. Even fast food and candy suppliers should believe in a healthy balanced lifestyle and I certainly believe in engaging with any new partners that could help us reach new audiences. I wouldn't be worried about damaging our reputation with collaborations such as these because we're on the right side of creating a healthier world. It would likely be more concerning for other industries to partner with us because they would be admitting their products are not helping people.
McDonald's isn't just any old partner. As arguably the world's leading fast-food chain, people have strong opinions on the merit of a fitness brand collaboration. You only have to think back to Cristiano Ronaldo and his interaction with a bottle of Coca Cola at the Euros to get an idea of the polarised views people have. When deciding to work with McDonald's, we had to take all of this into consideration; it wasn't a decision we took lightly.
Our conclusion was that, ultimately, we support ukactive's goal to get more people, more active, more often and it's in the spirit of this mission that we feel a partnership with McDonald's has such merit. To truly reach more people we, as a sector, must be willing to try new things and test new channels. If we continue to present broadly the same message through the same channels, we will only ever reach the same people.
McDonald's Monopoly is one of the largest consumer marketing campaigns in the UK, reaching up to 3.5 million people a day. It therefore presents a unique opportunity for our industry to reach a lot of people quickly. People we may not reach otherwise.
Hussle wasn't the only fitness brand to think this way. As part of a highly competitive tender process, we had to prove the national reach of our gym partners was a more compelling offer than a single gym chain collaboration. Our argument was that each time a McDonald's customer won the opportunity to visit a gym, it was crucially important there was a viable gym nearby. Without this, the offer may go unused and the opportunity to increase activity would be missed. We feel the campaign has been democratised for the benefit of thousands of operators rather than one single chain, and therefore positively impacts more gyms and health clubs.
McDonald's Monopoly is played by more than seven million people. It's a win/win scenario. Our brand partners can provide McDonald's customers with genuinely national reach and variety, whilst participating gyms benefit from the new customers McDonalds could bring.
The open question remains whether any lasting changes in activity levels will be achieved. It's too early to say and also not a question Hussle can answer alone as, ultimately, we rely on the service provided by the gym partners that McDonald's customers go on to visit. But with ukactive Chair Tanni Grey-Thompson calling for the UK to become the most active nation in the world by 2030, partnerships with mainstream brands such as McDonald's have an ever more important place in the sector.
As director of a public health consultancy with 25 years' experience working in public health for the NHS, local authorities and the third sector, I have a special interest in physical activity and health. For years we've seen a move by fast food giants to deflect the contribution of unhealthy diets on obesity, type-2 diabetes and high blood pressure – which continue to increase at an alarming rate.
Poor diet is the primary driver of this; over the last 20 years or so physical activity levels have not changed. Yet studies have found poor diet is linked to 11 million deaths worldwide and generates more disease than physical inactivity, alcohol and smoking combined.
Under pressure from governments, the food industry continues to deflect the focus away from its highly-processed, high-calorie and nutritionally-deprived foods and shift responsibility onto physical inactivity. In much the same way as big tobacco companies in years gone by, they have been successful in convincing us that inactivity, rather than the promotion and consumption of calorie-rich products, is the prime cause of obesity.
Through high profile sponsorship of large-scale sporting activities and funding initiatives that promote physical activity, the fast food industry has successfully stalled government obesity policies and rebuffed legislation relating to restriction of their products, such as the introduction of sugar taxes. In effect, the efforts of the fast food lobby to deflect blame has been a successfully deployed tactic in increasing their commercial profit at the cost of population health.
In my opinion, health clubs and gyms should be morally obliged to set an example to the public by disassociating themselves from the fast-food industry. Forming partnerships is effectively saying to members: 'it's OK to eat crap as long as you work out in our gym' – going against the body of evidence to the contrary. Such partnerships undermine the fitness industry's position as 'centres for health and fitness' and simply become a stick that will be used by fast food to beat the drum of the fast-food lobbyists.
1. Luke A, Cooper RS. Physical activity does not influence obesity risk: time to clarify the public health message. Int J Epidemiol 2013;42:1831–6. doi:10.1093/ije/dyt159
2. Health effects of dietary risks in 195 countries, 1990–2017: a systematic analysis for the Global Burden of Disease Study 2017. The Lancet HCMmag.com/dietaryrisk
It's an interesting and divisive topic. If you go back a long time ago to when I was CEO of ukactive, we received similar questions and criticism around a partnership with Coca Cola, despite the fact they also own enormous water brands and undoubtedly opened doors at high Government Health department levels. I believe anything that drives people to our doors and brings attention to exercise must be seriously considered.
Some may say it's partnering with 'the enemy' but are they really the enemy? McDonald's don't just sell burgers, they're one of the world's biggest sellers of water and apples and salads, too. They've recently looked at portion sizes and calories.
Like it or not McDonald's is the choice of a vast percentage of the population. We should be twisting it round – if McDonald's are keen to work with our industry, we should be grateful. After all, 69 million potential customers are buying their products worldwide every day.
We're not going to members and saying you must eat McDonalds! They are simply offering their customers the opportunity of a free gym trial. That's an opportunity not to be turned down by our industry. If people win a free day pass and come to us it's a chance to convert them we may never otherwise have had.
I think it is absolutely daft for us to always take a view against these companies – we may as well pretend they don't exist. But they do. And they're hugely successful. And they dwarf our industry. This is an enormous opportunity.
What will be interesting will be if people take it up. The people choosing to go to a McDonald's might be a hard gang to convince, but if we don't try we won't know – surely if a few wander in after having a burger, so much the better for us? Anything that brings more focus and attention to exercise can't be wrong.


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Digital Records Archivist
As Digital Records Archivist, Ben is involved with faculty interviews and can speak to issues on long term preservation. After faculty have done all their research and built up a body of work, he is interested in how to keep it around for other people to use in their research later. As an archivist, he is curious about what technologies faculty members use to create anything that may end up in an archive, as well as what their personal archiving habits are, whether they delete often, whether they are using standard or unusual software, and so on.
Now and Later: Digital Archiving
Sadly, Ben does not see digital archiving playing as much of a role in society as it used to. A lot of people know that they should back up their information but don't. Additionally, technology changes quickly, making it hard to keep up with. Ultimately, data growth has skyrocketed because technology allows us to create infinitely more. Ben cites photography practices in the past and present as an example. Photographers were more careful and took less pictures in the past because they had larger cameras and film was extremely expensive. They produced less, yet the photos were of higher quality. Now, it is so easy to take digital photos that the quantity people take are much greater, even though the quality is not always very high. Essentially, the amount of stuff people have to manage has grown so much, which makes it overwhelming for many people. Ben is unsure of whether this will change in the future.
Survivor: Technology We Can't Live Without
Ben uses email heavily for professional reasons and personal reasons. Email helps him to collaborate with other people, to communicate, and to move work between various computers. From an archivist's perspective, email is curious because people started using it and, in some sense, forgot about cleanliness, as shown by how email inboxes often are disorganized with messages sprawled out all over the place.

subset: commoncrawl


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Pardon our dust...revamping the site to make it better for you. Lots of new inventory being added daily.
Hours Mon- Fri 11-6pm, Sat 10-7, Sun 11-5... Curbside pickup for locals. Use discount code Curbside to let us know you will pick up.
Sterling Silver Stone Bangles
Sterling Silver (925)
Approximately 2.75inches, 9grams.
Sold Individually.


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|go ahead... be a heretic
Re: system calls problemby Aragorn (Curate)
|on May 27, 2004 at 08:11 UTC ( #356828=note: print w/replies, xml )
|Need Help??
Is "blabla.exe" a program which runs for a long time? system returns when the program called from it exits. If you want to fire off a program without waiting for it, you'll have to look into calling fork and exec yourself (system does a fork and exec, but waits for the child process to finish).
Update: From the "blabla.exe" I infer that you're using a Windows system. A look at Win32::Process could also help if portability is not an issue.
In Section Seekers of Perl Wisdom


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Cobb County is on the map thanks to forward-thinking entrepreneurs who make everything from gelato to beer to cleaning solutions. Because of the good business climate in the county and its proximity to transportation arteries, these businesses make Cobb the epicenter for executives who have brought their ideas to fruition.
Taking a Brand National
Citrus Magic is Kennesaw's Beaumont Products' flagship brand. CEO Hank Picken was "creative shopping" at a hardware store in downtown Kennesaw in the early 1990s, when he spotted the Citrus Magic cleaning product on the shelf. With a background in consumer products and marketing, Picken knew the product had potential. "I thought it would be a good product to take national, so I called the company that was distributing it in Peachtree City and offered to buy the brand," he says. "It was good timing because we bought the brand for $1 million and have turned it into a $30 million company today."
The company's big break into national marketing came a couple of years later when Citrus Magic was featured on QVC, with Picken's wife Cheryl as guest host and spokesperson. "QVC approached us at a trade show that we attended in Chicago, and that led to Cheryl making 80 to 85 appearances on QVC," Picken says. Today, Citrus Magic is sold by major retailers in the United States, including Walmart, Target, Publix, Kroger and various hardware chains, such as Ace and True Value.
Over the years, Beaumont Products has acquired another half-dozen products and taken them to market from its facility in Kennesaw. "Cobb County has been a great location for us," Picken says. "Being close to I-75 has made a difference (because of the transportation network) and the City of Kennesaw has been very supportive to work with us as we've grown."
Picken also attributes the company's success to the workforce in Cobb. "Our third hire came to us from the Tommy Nobis Center, and we continue to find great employees there," he says. "We also have hired a number of interns from Kennesaw State University." Picken serves as a visiting professor at the business school at KSU.
Sweet Success
From a small gelateria in Dallas, Texas, Joshua Hochschuler founded Talenti Gelato & Sorbetto, which is now based in Marietta. After learning about old-style gelato processes while he worked in Buenos Aires, Argentina, he moved back to his hometown of Dallas and created hand-crafted gelatos sold from a single location to gourmet markets and local restaurants. By 2005, his brand was so popular that he closed the gelateria and shifted his business focus to making gelato for high-end retailers and restaurants.
Looking for partners to assist him with growing his premium brand, in 2008 Hochschuler connected with Steve Gill and Eddie Phillips, co-founders of Belvedere and Chopin vodkas. The two had successfully created a new category of luxury vodkas, which they later sold to the luxury goods company Moet Hennessy Louis Vuitton. Gill and Phillips helped Hochschuler enhanced the Talenti brand, taking it to national grocery stores. The company moved its plant to Marietta this year.
"Moving our plant to Marietta in 2013 would be an opportunity to continue to grow the Talenti brand, and so far that has proven to be true," says Talenti CEO Gill. "We originally chose to move to Cobb County for its central location and proximity to Talenti's biggest Northeast and Southeast markets. Along the way, we've found that Cobb County is a great place for the Talenti plant, as it has provided us with a well trained, productive workforce, and terrific and supportive local authorities."
Tapping into Creativity
Red Hare Brewery in Marietta and Burnt Hickory Brewery in Kennesaw both produce unique hand-crafted beers carefully created by their founders.
Roger Davis started out in 2009 as a home brewer, crafting beers and creating recipes in his basement. Soon friends bragged about the beer he and friend Bobby Thomas were producing, and so the two founded Red Hare Brewery and opened for business on Labor Day 2011.
Today they're located in an 11,000-square-foot warehouse near I-75 and Red Hare's distinct brews are available in pubs and restaurants in Marietta, Decatur and Atlanta. The company's flagship brew is Long Day Lager. Along with Gangway IPA, they are the first craft beers in the state to be offered in 12-ounce cans.
"It was a natural to choose Cobb County and our hometown of Marietta," says Davis. "We're close to my house and we're close to the interstate and excellent transportation. And the space we found was conducive for establishing a brewery." Red Hare products are distributed through 750 bars and restaurants in Georgia and South Carolina, and they are also available in grocery and beverage stores. This year, Red Hare will produce approximately 155,000 gallons of beer.
Scott Hedeen was an avid home brewer for nearly 20 years when he decided to step it up a notch by creating Burnt Hickory Brewery in Kennesaw. He has capitalized on the Civil War theme by choosing descriptive names like Ezekiel's Wheel Pale Ale, his flagship, plus Cannon Dragger IPA and Big Shanty Graham Cracker Stout. He also brews seasonal styles.
Buy Local
Marion Savic's new store, The Local Exchange, offers a collection of Cobb-based, Georgia-based and regional products all in one location. Opened in early September at 130 South Park Square in downtown Marietta, the store offers local foods, art, merchandise, books by local authors and artisan beers from area brewers. The Local Exchange will also be the pick-up site for a local community-supported agriculture food cooperative.
"There's not a general store or a grocery on the Marietta Square, so our goal is to provide residents and visitors with a source for locally produced, useful and sought-after goods," Savic says. "It will also be a fun shopping experience."
She'll be offering Pure Bliss organic products, foods from Bernhard's and McEntyre's bakeries in Smyrna, sausages from Patak's Meats in Powder Springs, items from Georgia Spice Company in Marietta and prepared foods from Simply Fresh in East Cobb.
"You know, I've always wanted to have a store like this," she says. "My grandfather had a grocery store, and I'm just carrying on the tradition with healthy and fresh foods."
Here's a listing of some products with Cobb County connections:
- Elf on the Shelf: children's books, elfontheshelf.com, Marietta
- Kenny's Great Pies: key lime, mango and lemon pies, kennysusa.com, Smyrna
- Talenti Gelato & Sorbetto: gelato and premium ice cream, talentigelato.com, Marietta
- Citrus Magic, Beaumont Products: beaumontproducts.com, Kennesaw
- Burnt Hickory Brewery: craft beer, burnthickorybrewery.com, Kennesaw
- Red Hare Brewery: craft beer, redharebrewery.com, Marietta


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