http://www.visionmonday.com/index.asp?page=4_8639.htm
We are rapidly approaching a threshold in the way independent providers will operate and how they will coexist in a managed care environment. Davis Vision, VSP and others no longer work their original agenda of administrating and marketing managed vision care. They are now full on competitors of independent providers expanding into the marketplace with their own points of service. Behind all of this is a concentrated effort to manage the supply chain and all of its elements from manufacturing to distribution and marketing and merchandising. Independent providers are getting farther and farther away from sustaining their position because all the supply chain management (not profit margin mentality, but contribution to margin mentality) is occuring behind their backs and on the other side of the wholesale door, both lab and frame. No longer can independent providers live by the "buy low sell high" merchants philosophy. Independent providers need to come together on the supply chain side while they are still the largest group in the industry.
I know independent providers have a problem sitting at the same banquet table with each other. But, for heavens sake, isn't it time for them to grow up and start thinking outside their little shop on Main Street? This is like watching flesh eating bacteria at work. Independent providers are getting eaten alive and don't seem to realize that that little rash is about to eat their arm off. Like terrorism . .. independent providers need to wake up and realize that it's not the "Brooklyn Merchants Discount" they are dealing with. They are undermined and infiltrated in every nook and corner of their professional practice being. It's all the expenses they are footing the bill for to get that piece of plastic called a frame or a lens to their mailbox. Where's the intelligence? It certainly not the one with the retinascope, the laser, or the patternless edger. It's the people the independent provider should be hooking up with.
I can't believe the general population of independent providers can be so uninformed, unaffiliated, and naive to actually think they will survive without taking full control of the consumers revenue. This is serious stuff.
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