I believe that the notion of “service” needs to be redefined. If you buy a Gibson guitar, you don’t get free strings for life. Nor are the strings you buy typically installed for free. But the installation doesn’t cost you $250, either.
I find that much of the HA Industry’s pricing is obscenely bloated and predatory. Is it any wonder that customers object?
Today I have reason to be happy. I’d left a voice message at a ENT clinic, and today a woman returned my call. She knew her stuff and was able to tell me up front what all my costs would be. Periodic adjustments and cleanings are free for as long as they can still program the HA, she said. Even 10 or 12 years down the road? I asked. The reply was: yes. She also told me exactly what their standard repair charge is when the warranty runs out. She sounded so much more competent than the others I’d talked to, I gladly made an appointment for next Thursday.
I had assumed that a place with numerous MDs as well as Audis would be prohibitively expensive in their fees (including after-care), but I was wrong.
My ears produce a lot of wax. As such, I needed to go in for cleanings every two weeks or so. These were free. However, I bought the Jodi-vac vaccuum for hearing aids and don’t have to go in for cleanings anymore. My audi was really impressed with the device when I brought it in for a tutorial. This device is great and well worth it!
What your ENT told you over the phone is standard for my HA provider. Not a bad deal.
But with aids from Costco you get domes and wax filters. All I have needed to buy for my aids were batteries.
The only reason Costco can charge less is that their volume allows them to negotiate a much lower price on the wholesale level and there store overhead is significantly lower that a stand alone clinic. It is basic Business 101.
Thx for sharing about this vacuum. I have a lot of wax too. Somehow though, my old Oticons didn’t require changing the filter very often. The Philips 9030 I now have gets clogged fairly often. I have to change the filter even though it doesn’t look like it’s full of wax at all, it just becomes plugged so the sound is muffled or non-existent.
I have found the prices for service going up over the last 25 years I have worn hearing aids. For example, one place charges $60 “restocking” fee to send to the manufacturer for repairs while the aid is under manufacturer’s warranty. Also, when I purchased the hearing aid, I was given pricing for routine cleaning and office visits. After one year, the office raised the prices, I wrote a letter with a copy of my original paperwork and the office backed down and gave me the original price not the increase they were trying to charge me.
It is my understanding that some companies like Beltone do free cleanings and servie for the life of the hearing aid. But then some places give you the hard sell every time you go in. Since I go in every six months and have had two repairs in the past 3 years that involved the manufacturer, I think it is important to find out the prices and save your initial paperwork. Get it in writing what the cleanings and service will be going forward. After five years Phonak no longer made parts on one of my set of aids so I had to get new ones or find a mom and pop shop for repair.
I have some understanding of the difficulty of competing with a cost cutter. My father ran a luggage store in a low income area when ‘factory outlets’ were opening.
I have no doubt that Costco overhead is lower than that of standalone clinics, but I would bet they trade off a lot of markup in favor of selling in a lot of volume. The 1st audi I consulted told me my only choice was to spend $6,000 on HAs when a complete shoulder replacement (with 2 surgeons doing the work) probably didn’t cost me $600. I’d have been much more open to $2,000 for aids an the 1st year of service, with follow-up service costing me reasonable prices. That probably would have gotten him pretty close to $6K over 4-5 years. That’s a lot less than $6K up front - but he would have gotten a lot more than $0.
Standalone clinics may have some advantages in expertise and in relationships with customers. I’m on my 5th Costco person, and I’d rather not have to deal with the parade.
Have you considered charging prices closer to Costco’s. Do you have professional associations? Has anyone modeled and tested different business models?
I don’t know the answers to my questions. They do not mean to tell you how to run your business, just to elicit answers, since I’m forever curous.
It would be very difficult to try and match Costco pricing. I have seen many offices try to do that and go out of business. There are (or have been) many buying groups for professionals to try and get a bigger volume discount on product. When I retired from private practice, a top of the line hearing aid wholesaled at $1200 - 1400 PER HEARING AID and that was with the additional volume discount. So matching Costco’s $1600 for a pair retail is just not an option. Theoretically, the higher price of a private clinic is offset by better service and better expertise. In a perfect world that would be the case but when I was consulting all around the country, I saw some business (I won’t even call them a “practice”) that if they sold hearing aid at cost, the patient would still be over paying. Unfortunately there is a very diverse group of people who get involved with hearing aids. Some are phenominal and others are the opposite. But I guess it is the same as any business, there are the good, the bad and the ugly.
I don’t think local clinics need to match Costco’s prices, and they can’t sell at a loss and survive for long.
I do think that personal service and nice digs will appeal to many buyers who choose Costco because the price differential is so significant. Lowering prices and unbundling services might result in a big enough increase in volume to more than make up for the lower markup.
I know one practice that does that - $150 for consultation on HAs, lower prices for aids, unbundled services. They would have gotten my wife’s business, but our insurance pays off much better for bundled services than for unbundled one. So the business model probably needs to give options.
That’s just a hypothesis, though.
I saw more than a little humor in charging customers/patients to listen to a sales pitch. 
The good part was that she explained why she recommended what she did instead of other HAs that they sold. It was worth the cost to us, and we’re probably not alone.
Assuming you don’t have any ear canal or eardrum problems that would rule it out, you could try squirting warm water into each ear, with an ear syringe, once a day. I produce a lot of wax, and it became unmanageable when I got custom molds with the wax filter completely exposed at the tip. My audiologist suggested water, and now wax is a non-issue for me, to the extent that little or no wax is found when my ears are examined.
Presumably you were paying for the test and the medical recommendation, and then the sales pitch was free.
The test was done a couple of weeks before the recommendation, and Medicare paid for it. 
To your larger point, I agree it’s a service that is well worth paying for. Besides, I much prefer their approach to the ‘you need this HA for $6,000’.
In that particular meeting, I don’t know exactly where the line was between the recommendation and the offer to sell, and I don’t think the location of that line is important. After all, a large part of selling a product like an HA is educating the customer. Even $1,600 for an aid at Costco requires a significant commitment of cash.
My point of reference for pricing is the pre-inflation '60s, when $1600 paid a year’s tuition at my college. Being stuck in the '60s is, no doubt, part of the problem with the $6,000 price tag, but it’s pretty standard human behavior. )
I was just at a clinic the unbundles all services except the initial fitting. They do offer lifetime services for $2500 but nobody pays that. The normal visits are $40.
I bought outside my home state. Apparently they will not do remote services to out of state residents due to state licensing laws.
Yeah, every time my mum says, “Oh, but I only made $14000/year when I started teaching!” I reach for the inflation calculator. 
I try to keep the sales talk to the very end after hashing out the correct style and coupling options and what other assistive devices might be indicated. I don’t like it, so it’s a lot of “here’s what the manufacturers would say the differences are, here’s my clinical experience of what they actually are, here’s what I WOULDN’T get, I will answer all of your questions and then you get whichever one you like and if it doesn’t work we’ll switch”. A certain type of patient seems to appreciate that, a certain type of patient definitely doesn’t and just wants me to tell them exactly what to get which I struggle with because I don’t want to make financial decisions for them. Sometimes I wonder if I should literally say, “this is the end of the medical recommendation part of this discussion and we are now moving on to pricing and marketting.”
Neville, I agree with most of what you say on the forum but I have to disagree with putting a number of option out and making the patient decide. If I go to a professional, I want a professional recommendation. If I wanted to decide on my own I probably would not have gone to a professional in the first place. Where patients wait an overage of 7 years (if that is still an accurate number) before doing something about their hearing, the last thing I want to do is give them an excuse to put it off even farther by thinking about it. When I make a recommendation, I have enough confidence in it to give and explain why. If it does not work, I will gladly exchange once I know what the problem is. Given three price points, most people will choose the one in the middle, but if lifestyle suggests the premium level, are you really doing them a service?
That depends on how knowledgeable the patient is. They know their own priorities better than the professional. After we discussed, primarily their 3 most common brands and models I was asked to choose. I already had some information and a preliminary ranking. The discussion, along with pricing differences cemented my choice.
Personally I have had too many bad experiences where the professional does what they see as best with little or no regard for the patient’s needs or concerns.
I suppose I’m not convinced that as practitioners we actually have any rational way to determine which sensorineural loss patients will be happy in a mid versus a high level device. Certainly the manufacturers try to convince us that it is lifestyle related and that mid level devices are for quiet homebodies, but. . . in my experience that correlation is really loose. I’ve run multi-technology level trials with patients quite regularly and some people notice a big difference and some people don’t, and as far as I can tell lifestyle is not the critical factor.
I very much appreciate the contributions of registered providers on this forum. Thanks.
I, too, like to know both my options and what the pro recommends. I’m not sure of this, but I suspect that participants in this forum are somewhat different from the usual customer, so perhaps normal customers have different desires.