A Peloton bike being delivered in New York in October. Wait times for the exercise bikes are back to pre-pandemic levels.
Photo: Richard B. Levine/Zuma Press
It might seem like Mr. Big’s death by Peloton in the first episode of “Sex and the City” reboot was the straw that broke the camel’s back for home fitness. Turns out, it was already on ice.
Wait times for those fancy exercise bikes are back to pre-pandemic levels, for example. An even better litmus test is the stock market, where shares of equipment companies Peloton PTON -5.38% and Nautilus NLS -5.17% have lost three quarters or more of their value even as once-idled gym chain Planet Fitness’s PLNT 0.10% stock nears an all-time high.
But perhaps the best real-time indicator of the urgency to exercise at home is the price of one of last year’s most coveted pieces of equipment: Bowflex’s SelectTech 552 adjustable dumbbells. A pair of them got as high as $1,825 on April 21, 2020 on Amazon.com while used ones were advertised for as much as $1,450 a few weeks later, according to price tracking site CamelCamelCamel. It gave a fresh meaning to the phrase “no pain, no gain.”
Now, though, a new pair is being offered by Target for its pre-Covid-19 price of $299. A variety of suspiciously similar looking knockoffs with brand names like CHNZNC, Funcode, BIZBON and Famistar can be purchased on Amazon for even less. Inflation overall might be at a multidecade high, but you can’t use it as an excuse any more for that Covid flab.
Write to Spencer Jakab at spencer.jakab@wsj.com and Laura Forman at laura.forman@wsj.com
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Appeared in the December 11, 2021, print edition as ‘OVERHEARD.’
