The TV commercials advertising LA Weight Loss Centers announce a price that appears to be right. It says, "Now just $7 a week based on a 52-week program payable in advance."
But according to ABC NEWS, five angry women from Albany, N.Y., told Greg Hunter of ABCNEWS' Good Morning America's that they turned to LA Weight Loss to drop some pounds, but ended up dropping some extra dollars. Now, they say they feel cheated. They are among a number of dieters who say they were hit with hidden costs when they joined the program.
New York's attorney general, Eliot Spitzer, investigated the company and said it was not being straight with the public. Its advertisements, according to Spitzer, led people to believe they would get on the program for a few bucks a week.
"They were using the old bait and switch, " Spitzer told Good Morning America. "Come in here, $7 a week. And then you go in, you're interested in the product and you find out it costs two or three times that. And that's not the way businesses are supposed to operate."
Spitzer said LA Weight Loss inflated the cost of the diet by routinely requiring customers to buy snack bars called LA Lites or Nu Lites, available only from L.A. Weight Loss. The attorney general said the fine print stating "setups and supplements extra" in some ads did not clear things up.
LA Weight Loss recommends that its customers eat its 180-calorie LA Lite bars twice a day, between meals. But the company said it's not a required part of the LA Weight Loss diet.
Without admitting any wrongdoing, LA Weight Loss recently paid $110,000 to settle with Spitzer's office.in a statement, the company said it did so "to avoid protracted legal costs."
The Difference a State Makes
In order to find out whether the diet would be available at the advertised price, an ABCNEWS producer joined two different women as they joined two different LA Weight Loss Centers, with hidden cameras rolling.
Their first stop was an LA Weight Loss Center in Troy, N.Y., shortly after the company settled with the state attorney general.
Although the LA Weight Loss counselor tried to sell the first woman $800 worth of LA Lite Bars, she did not claim that they were required for participation in the diet program. The $334 advance payment she quoted for participation in the program did not include the LA Lites, and did not exceed the advertised price of $7 dollars a week.
But when the other woman joined an LA Weight Loss Center across the state line in Secaucus, N.J., the experience was quite different. The counselor there insisted that the LA Lite bars were required for participation in the diet program.
The plan required an upfront payment of $446 and it would last for a year and five months.
That cost was below the advertised $7-a-week price, but the counselor also said the diet wouldn't work without the bars. "It's not going to work for you, " she said. The bars run $14 per box but the counselor suggested the woman buy as many as 90 boxes in order to get a discount. The cost of the bars ended up at $872, boosting the total potential upfront cost of the diet program in New Jersey to $1,300.
The manager of the New Jersey center stressed to the woman, who was accompanied by the ABCNEWS producer, that the bars were an essential part of the program. "It's part of the program, " the manager said.
Back in New York, Spitzer said dieters across America should be on the lookout for the hidden costs. "I would say, be careful, be cautious, " he said. "You should know that this company has gotten into trouble elsewhere in the nation."
Spitzer said people should be sure to find out what the diet is going to cost before signing anything.
The company has started running some commercials that do not mention price and it said that whenever the ads do include a price, it will let people know that setups and supplements are extra.
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