Support local St. Pete businesses, and you keep this city exactly the way it feels on a Saturday afternoon: alive. Murals cover more than 500 walls across the city. Restaurants, bars, and fitness studios built by their owners with their own hands fill in the rest. It feels permanent.
It is not. A lot of small, locally owned businesses here are fighting to keep their doors open, and most people walking past have no idea how close it is to changing.
Restaurant Closures Get the Headlines. Local Fitness Doesn’t.
Every time a St. Pete restaurant closes, it makes the local news, the neighborhood Facebook groups, the “we’ll miss you” posts. That attention is deserved. But gyms, studios, and trainers have been closing in this city in droves, accelerating the freefall every year, and almost nobody is talking about it. That’s what we want to bring to the forefront here.
The Same Thing Has Been Happening to Gyms, Studios, and Trainers — Even More So
St. Pete and Gulfport have lost a long list of places to move, sweat, and get stronger in recent years. YouFit — a fitness chain that got its start right here in St. Pete — filed for Chapter 11 bankruptcy and walked away from the leases on several Tampa Bay-area health clubs, along with its downtown St. Pete business office. (St Pete Catalyst) The independent studios kept following in the years after. YogaBlu Studio, teaching yoga in St. Pete since 2010, closed. So did Barre Forte, Hype Dance Studio, Platinum Twirl Pole Fitness, 4th Street Boxing and Community Center, CrossFit Blackbeard, Hells Bells, Strength Camp Gym, World Body Fitness and Gray’s Physical Therapy and Pilates. Burn Boot Camp closed its St. Pete location, and D1 Training closed too. In Gulfport, both Gulfport Yoga and Gulfport Healing Arts Center closed. Even a few of the big chain gyms have shut St. Pete locations since then — a reminder that a familiar logo isn’t a safety net either.
A gym or studio closing hits differently than a restaurant closing. You can always find another burger. It’s much harder to find another coach who knows your bad shoulder, another instructor who noticed you were favoring your left knee before you did, another studio where the front desk actually knows your name. When a fitness business closes, people don’t just lose a workout. They lose momentum, a routine, a coach who was tracking their progress, and often a piece of their support system. That is a heavier loss than most people give it credit for — and it is exactly why who you choose to train with matters just as much as where you get your coffee, maybe more.
A local owner who lives ten minutes from the studio has every reason in the world to make sure it survives. A regional executive somewhere else does not.
Why the Hard Seasons Keep Getting Harder
Every local business owner in this city knows summer is lean. The snowbirds go home, the visitors thin out, and revenue slows down for months at a time. That has always been true. What is different now is that the cushion between one hard season and the next has all but disappeared.
Can’t forget the absolute decimation of Covid on the fitness industry of course. Then, a couple of years ago Hurricanes Helene and Milton hit the Gulf Coast within two weeks of each other, and small, independent businesses took the hardest hit. Big chains have insurance teams, corporate reserves, and regional supply chains to lean on. A locally owned gym, studio, or restaurant has none of that — just the owner’s savings, a line of credit, and whatever goodwill the community can offer. (McKinsey & Company) Local business activity in St. Pete has fallen sharply over the past three years, hours worked and employees on the clock both dropping by more than half in the hardest weeks. (WFLA)
Recovery from a storm like that does not happen in a season. It happens over years, in the middle of the same slow summers and rising rents that were already squeezing these businesses before the storms ever hit.
Locally Owned Is Not the Same as Big Business With a Local Sign
Here is the part that is easy to miss: not every dollar spent in St. Pete does the same thing for St. Pete.
Researchers who study this call it the local multiplier effect. One well-documented study found that locally owned retailers return 52 percent of their revenue back into the local economy, compared to just 14 percent for chain retailers. For restaurants, the gap is even wider: locally owned spots recirculate 79 percent of revenue locally, compared to 30 percent for chains. (AMIBA — The Local Multiplier Effect)
That money does not disappear into a spreadsheet. It becomes a paycheck for someone who lives in Gulfport, rent paid to a local landlord, a tip that goes toward someone’s tuition. When you spend at a locally owned business, more of that money stays right here, doing more work for this community.
A big chain can sponsor a 5K and put its logo on a jersey, but the real profit from that transaction moves to shareholders and investment funds who have never walked along Central Avenue and never will. The person who owns the local coffee shop, the neighborhood gym, or the corner bar lives here, pays property taxes here, and hires their staff from here. When their business does well, this community does well. We wrote about what that difference looks like from the inside — read Why I Love Working at The Athleticus and Not a Big Gym.
What I See From Inside This Industry
I run a small, locally owned business myself, and shop here too so I feel this from both sides. I have watched friends who own gyms, restaurants, and venues in this city cut staff hours, then cut positions, then eventually close for good. Every time, it is the same story: rising costs, a slow season that lasted too long, and not enough of a cushion to make it to the next one.
What makes it harder to watch is what happens right after: the same people who mourn a closure publicly are, more often than not, already spending their next paycheck at the corporate chain down the street instead.
It is about understanding what you are actually voting for every time you spend money. A locally owned studio built around real attention and real relationships is a different thing than a franchise built around volume. Related: Private Personal Training vs. Big Gyms. The owner behind the counter or leading your session depends on people choosing them, again and again, to stay in business.
This Isn’t About What You Can Afford
Let’s be clear about who this is for. This is not an ask to stretch your budget, take on debt, or put your finances at risk to make a point. If a local option is genuinely out of reach for you right now, that’s a different conversation, and it’s not what this is about.
This is for the person who can already afford the coffee, the workout, the haircut, the night out — and could still afford it even if the local option costs a little more than the big-box or chain alternative. I’m speaking to the people who don’t need the Groupon or the 4th of July Big Box Sale Extravaganza Special Buy 10 get 1 Free or whatnot. The ask isn’t to spend money you don’t have. It’s to notice that you already are spending it, and to deliberately choose to shop local with that money instead of defaulting to whichever big-box option happens to be closest, cheapest, or most advertised on social media.
The same person who posts “I’m so sad, I loved that place” when a local favorite closes is, more often than not, getting their pet supplies from a national chain or renewing a membership at whichever gym happened to be closest to the highway exit. Not because they had to. Because it was easy, or automatic, or what their AI chatbot suggested, because SEO finds the biggest spenders first. Nobody does this on purpose. But the outcome adds up the same way either time: money that could have gone to a neighbor goes somewhere that does nothing for this city instead.
If you have the means to choose where you get your lunch, your workout, your AC repair, your taxes done — that choice is one of the most powerful things you can do for St. Pete and Gulfport. It does not require a big gesture or a special occasion. It just takes a decision.
And if you are new here — if you moved to St. Pete or Gulfport because you fell in love with the vibe, the murals, the independent coffee shops, the neighborhood bar where people actually know your name — that vibe does not maintain itself. It exists because the people who came before you chose to support the businesses that built it. If you loved this place enough to move here, please consider loving it enough to support the businesses that make it what it is. Otherwise, it’s worth asking what you moved here for in the first place.
It absolutely breaks my heart to lay off an employee or to see my friends, who work so hard and provide incredible goods and services close their shops. I’m sad to think of the long list of entrepreneurs I know who’ve left the city. So here is my take on the simplest way to support local St. Pete businesses: think of three you genuinely love. A dog groomer. A bar. A beauty studio. A gym. Pick three, and make a real decision to spend your money there on a regular basis — not just once, but as a habit. Have those three be your go-to’s. That is what actually keeps a small business open through a slow summer or a hard recovery year. Not one big gesture. A steady, repeated choice, made by enough people who already have the means to make it.
That way, the next time a local favorite is at risk, you are not writing “I loved that place” in the comments. You already helped keep it here.
Where The Athleticus Fits Into This
If a locally owned gym is one of your three, we would be glad to be it. The Athleticus is a boutique personal training studio between Gulfport and St. Pete, built and run by people who live in this community — not a franchise, not a chain, not a name licensed out to an investor group. Our coaches bring more than 75 years of combined experience, and every client trains in a private studio with real attention, not a rotating cast of undertrained staff on a crowded floor. Related: Why Hiring a Certified Personal Trainer Matters for Safe Fitness
We know what it costs to keep a locally owned business running in this city, and we know what it means when a client chooses us instead of a big-box membership down the road. Related: What Personal Training Costs in St. Pete — and What You Get for Your Money. If you have been curious about training somewhere that is actually built around you, we would love to talk.
- Schedule your Complimentary Goal Review — a real conversation about your goals, with no pressure attached.
- Purchase our exclusive 2-part personal training assessment and get started today.
And whether you train with us or somewhere else entirely, we hope you will still pick your three. St. Pete’s murals, its restaurants, its studios between Gulfport and St. Pete, and everything else that makes this city feel unmistakably itself — none of it holds on by accident. It holds on because enough of us decided it was worth showing up for. Related: Fitness After 50 Gulfport and 6 Low-Impact Workouts in Gulfport are two more reminders of what makes this community worth investing in — one small, local business at a time. Also worth a look: Personal Training Memberships: What You Really Get at Athleticus, for a closer look at what “locally owned” actually buys you.