Yeah, I agree with you that it’s best to trial one set of aids at a time, and since you’d have to pay for the aids to be able to take them home to try it out more, it wouldn’t make sense to pay for both aids and try them in parallel. If you choose to try the Jabra first because you think it has a slight edge over the 9040, then it makes sense.
The only thing I wanted to point out was that walking around Costco alone shouldn’t be sufficient to decide to settle on which aid permanently, but for sure it’s enough to decide to settle on which aid to try out first.
But do keep an open mind that even if you’re perfectly happy with the Jabra after a few months, I think the 9040 is also worth trying out to compare if you’re willing to invest more time and money (temporarily until you decide which one to return). I assume that both of them cost the same?
Also search this forum for Philips vs Jabra threads to see what other people think. I found this one Philips vs. Jabra (Costco decision), but there may be more as well.
By the way, I think with your audiogram, you can probably afford you to wear open domes with the Philips 9040 and not have to worry about feedback due to the new feedback prevention technology they got from Oticon. While they’re not 100% the same as the Oticon More or Real, they do share a lot of great peripheral technologies. The sudden sound stabilizer and wind & handling stabilizer are the 2 new technologies available recently on the Oticon Real that also seem to have made their ways over to the Philips 9040.