There remains little doubt that health club membership is a luxury good. More evidence to support this comes from China. NPR’s Marketplace reports (“…Sport towards China“):
“…the average Chinese citizen now has much more disposable income than he or she ever had before. And a big thing they’re doing with that income . . . I mean, you can go out into the rural provinces, and I know you’ve been there. You’ll see, you know, the old people doing tai chi in the front yard, and it’s wonderful. But you go into the urban centers and the young people are joining health clubs.
A health club opens every day in mainland China. One a day. And so there are 50,000 of them right now, and they’re just proliferating, and they have personal trainers. So sporting goods businesses — and there are five sort of top companies there — they’re gaining, it’s something close to 20 percent a year. It’s a great investment.”