Some Questions on a Lost Connection

Question: I received in the mail a questionnaire from a video dating service called Connection (formerly the Millionaires Club). I filled it out due to my curiosity and returned it. I was contacted three times by someone from their Westwood office to set up an appointment to tell me more about the club. Finally, I went in for an interview. This turned out to be a high-pressure sales situation that involved enticements, such as offering me a half-price rate for one year and telling me that there were two men in the club for every woman.

After two hours of pressure and after refusing five or six times, I was finally worn down and signed the contract under my own assumption that I had three days to cancel the contract if I changed my mind. I voiced this assumption and the salesman did nothing to dispel my delusions. The next morning I realized I was not interested in being a member of this service. I found out that I do not legally have three days to cancel because the sale was not made in my home.

The people at the club to whom I have talked have continued to apply pressure to keep me in the club and told me that I could not cancel my membership due to some fine print on the contract I signed. I have submitted my request to cancel my membership to the “membership committee” at their Orange County office, but am afraid that this is going to be an uphill battle and that it might ruin my good credit rating. I had no idea that this organization uses such tactics to coerce membership.--K.C.

Answer: Video dating services, like health clubs, ballroom dancing clubs and a host of other activities and interests of a specialized nature, are basically impulse enrollments. They seem like such a great idea--at the time. Repentance sometimes comes later.

In our follow-up telephone conversation, you supplied me with some additional facts: The regular one-year membership in Connection (actually named LA Connection, part of a chain operation) was quoted to you as being $1,450, and the special half-price offer was, sure enough, $725, which you put on your credit card. The issue here, then, isn’t a matter of ruining your “good credit rating,” since the deed is already done--you’ve paid the money. The question really is: Have you got a prayer of getting it back? And the answer, frankly, is: probably not. “High pressure,” of course, is in the eye of the beholder, and to Philippe Naveau, manager of LA Connection in Westwood, what you experienced was a sales presentation pointing out to you the advantages of membership in the club.

This involves maintaining on file with LA Connection a lengthy, in-depth, personality profile exploring everything from your shoe size to your hobbies, interests, dietary quirks, tastes in reading material, movies and on and on and on. This is in addition to photographs as well as a video-taped interview with you. (Although, you tell me, you haven’t gotten around to this procedure yet because of your disillusionment.)

Members of both sexes, once they have studied the files of other members, can then come to the club and review the video tape of up to 50 members a year as candidates for a possible, personal follow-through. (In your case, however, because of the special rate you received, your selections are limited to 30 a year.)

As video dating services go, Naveau said, LA Connection has been around quite a while--for about 10 years under the previous name, the Millionaires Club, and, for the past two as a part of the Connection chain. And yes, you are quite right, if the sales pitch had been made in your home, and if you had signed the contract there, state law gives you three days to cancel out without penalty. And this is why, Naveau added, “we never go to the home. We make the presentation here, so the law doesn’t apply.”

At the moment, Naveau said, “we’ve got between 4,500 and 6,000 members in the Los Angeles area.” And how do you measure the effectiveness of such approaches to the ancient problem of loneliness? “Well,” he continued, “in this past May alone, we had 11 members announce their engagements. That should tell you something.”

Membership dissatisfaction, however, isn’t unknown, LA Connection’s manager concedes, but “when it does happen--for whatever reason--we try to sit down with the member, find out what the reason is and try to work something out. We almost never refund money, however.”

Although he hasn’t seen your contract, of course, California assistant attorney general Jerry Smilowitz assumes that it is probably in order as a legally binding instrument. “Although it seems like it might be a fruitful area for litigation. It’s the third complaint about dating services I’ve received this week.”

Would you, in other words, be prepared to take the matter to small claims court? As far as getting your money back otherwise--by asking your credit card company to stop payment on the charge--the outlook isn’t good.

“We simply can’t get involved in buyer remorse,” one banking executive said. “The only thing we can do under the Fair Credit Billing Act is to put a temporary hold on a charge when there is some evidence of non-fulfillment or an error in billing--merchandise isn’t delivered as promised, or when a consumer pays for car repairs, for instance, and then claims that the repairs were never made. And this is simply giving both parties time to arbitrate the matter in about 60 days. Just changing your mind doesn’t cut it.”

I’m afraid that’s not very helpful, and I’m not going to belabor you about the need for thinking and rethinking the situation thoroughly before signing anything in the future. I’m sure you’ve gotten plenty of that from your own conscience.

The other alternative: Take the thing philosophically. You’ve paid for it, so you might as well utilize the club to the hilt. Who knows? It apparently worked 11 times in May.