Memberships that hold their own terms

The term, the price and the notice period are recorded as what that member agreed to on the day they joined. Change your plans next year and their agreement does not move, because a term that silently re-derives from today's pricing is the complaint every consumer regulator in this industry receives.

Six weeks off for an injury is six weeks of billing stopped and six weeks added to the end. Those are two different numbers — the days allowed and the days actually taken — and conflating them is how a member ends up short-changed or a business gives away a month.

Deliberately. Pausing the notice period while somebody is on hold would lock them in indefinitely through a mechanism sold to them as a kindness, and giving notice is not the same as losing access — a member in their notice period walks in as normal until the day it ends.

At six in the morning with nobody behind them, a cancelled membership is refused and sorted out at the desk in five minutes. At a lift gate with four hundred people queuing it is admitted and flagged, because a stopped queue is a safety problem and the money can be settled afterwards. That distinction is a required setting, so no door can inherit the wrong one by accident.