NEW YORK -- Shares of Town Sports International (TSI) dropped Monday after an analyst with Piper Jaffray downgraded the stock from “buy” to “neutral.”

Shares of TSI stock fell 13 cents, or 4.1 percent, to $3.08 on Monday. TSI’s stock closed at $3.28 on the NASDAQ stock exchange today.

Analyst Anthony N. Gikas also trimmed his price target of the stock by $1 to $4. Gikas says weakness in consumer confidence and employment will hurt the New York-based company’s membership.

“Based on deteriorating macroeconomic factors in key territories, including New York, we expect revenue and earnings declines are in front of Town Sports,” Gikas says in an Associated Press report.

Gikas also says he expects TSI will have flat revenue in the 2009 calendar year and that earnings per share will decline. Although Gikas does not expect strong improvement in the near-term, he does think that TSI’s management is doing its best to boost membership.

Financial analysts also have reduced the target price of another publicly traded club company, Life Time Fitness, but they have also reiterated their “buy” rating for Life Time’s stock, which closed at $14.58 on the New York Stock Exchange today.

Analysts at Stifel Nicolaus and KeyBanc Capital Markets have held their “buy” rating for Life Time while an analyst for Barclays Capital reiterated the company’s “equal weight” rating. KeyBanc reduced its target price for Life Time’s stock from $30 to $20 on Dec. 30.

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