I am joining an excellent private practice leading to partnership. I'm willing to take less at the beginning for the long term satisfaction and payoff.
Congratulations. I think this is how it should be for every optometrist - graduate, complete a residency, and then find an excellent opportunity in private practice. Once you make partner, I assume you will make sure that your office hires at least one new OD a year. Then, all you need to do is convince 25 other offices in your state to hire one new OD a year. Once you have accomplished that, you can work on the other 49 states so that every OD graduating every year has a private practice opportunity. At that time, we can discuss how bad corporate optometrists are. Until then you have to realize that the issue has nothing to do with commercial OD's not being willing to work for less in private practice, it's that there aren't enough legitimate private practice opportunities to place every grad.
To me its naive to think that commercial optometry does not do tremendous damage to our profession.
This is the common mantra of the disgruntled private practice OD that I am sure you heard on a site like ODWire. Before I purchased my practice in Washington, I looked very hard at opportunities in California. I saw a lot of private practice offices that were no more than an optical shop with a tiny lane stuffed into a closet in a strip mall. A lot of these offices had phoropters and slit lamps from the 60's. Forget about visual field machines or scanning lasers because they would take up valuable retail space. What's naive is the belief that a doctor in LensCrafters with brand new state of the art equipment including GDx, automated perimeter, fundus camera, corneal topographer, etc looks any less professional than some of the private practice docs I looked at buying out. Furthermore, even doctors that are in stand alone buildings seem to make the optical space the biggest part of the office. If you wonder why patients think of us as spectacle peddlers, you only have to look at how the majority of private practices run their business. I mean no disrespect, but I have been at this game a lot longer than you and I can assure you there are plenty more "7 - 4" out the door exams in private practice than any commercial basher wants to admit.
What's even more naive is to think that if every doctor left commercial today, and no new grad took their place, that we would be better off as a profession. Sure we would eliminate corporations from being involved in optometry, but we would have a serious oversupply issue. You like to think that patients would rather go to a private practice, but the sad fact is that patients will go to the least expensive option unless they have insurance. If you don't think there will be a ton of starving docs willing to see 50 patients a day at $50 an exam, you are sadly mistaken.
Once you are in your successful private practice, you will learn that there are patients that will seek out your office because they see value in going to a private practice, but the majority of your patients will come to you because you are on their insurance plan. If commercial optometry did not exist those patients would not seek out your office. They would seek out that private practice in the local strip mall advertising free eye exams with the purchase of glasses.
My advice to you and all the other young members on this forum is to focus on patient care in your office and forget about what is happening in the commercial locations. Educate your patients on the value of an optometric eye exam and treat your patients well, and you will be successful. Let the unsuccessful OD's complain about commercial optometry. I promise that you will much happier in the long run.
