Ending the Year with a Little Rant and a Few Happy Tears

I’M GONNA BE HONEST with you … I don’t like the Big Survey. It’s a lot of work. And if I liked numbers … or data … or <ugh!> math, I would have entered a much more financially lucrative career than magazine publishing. But just because I don’t like it, doesn’t mean I don’t see the value in it. Every year it reveals interesting statistics about the state of your eyecare businesses across the country. I won’t spoil it by sharing any of those here — you can turn to page 40 for all that goodness — but I did have two observations I would like to share.

One, people will do some dumb stuff for a $5 Starbucks gift card. The number of spam responses from fake people who were clearly not ECPs that I had to delete was astonishing. It took me longer to read through every entry and delete the obviously fake and AI-written entries than pulling and crunching the data eventually did. (And yes, I read every. single. one.)

Secondly, one of the questions we asked this year was “What was the last thing — no matter how small — that brought a smile to your face in the business?” and boy, reading your responses literally made me tear up. (See some of those responses on page 48.) It was the last data set I had to pull, and it made the frustration of crunching all those numbers and editing the responses to the long-form questions worth it. Thank you for showing me there really are lovely, decent, generous people in the world who find joy in helping others. It was the perfect time of year for the reminder.

I am going to keep this note short … because the Big Survey package is not… and encourage you to get comfy and spend some time with that story. It is certainly not the only compelling thing in this issue but it will require your full attention.

Best wishes for your business,