of the most thoughtful gestures you can make to people who have….Presbyopia. (See below for the medical explanation)
No it is not a run for the Presidency by Oprah; it is the inability for some of us more senior people to read things close up. That would include me and almost everyone I know over 45 years of age.
So what is the big idea? Have reader glasses on hand to offer to people you deal with. Think about your business or service and consider when your clients or customers might have to read something. If we forget our glasses here are a few things we cannot do:
- We can’t read a menu
- We can’t read a credit card receipt we are signing
- We can’t read clothing sizes
- We can’t read a map
- We can’t read a contract
- We can’t see a photo
- We can’t read directions
- We can’t read ingredients
- We can barely see our iPhones!
The most obvious place to have reader glasses on hand is in a restaurant. We have been to hundreds of restaurants and have only been offered reading glasses once. Another time our server went to the hotel gift shop, bought a pair, loaned them to us and kept them as he needed them too. Why can’t a restaurant have a few pairs in a case that can be offered to people who are holding a menu at the end of their reach or who are crowding around the only candle to get more light? Better yet why doesn’t an enterprising Realtor buy a few pairs, stick them in a branded container and offer them free to a restaurant to loan out.
If you are a Realtor, Mortgage Broker or Insurance Agent you are handing small print for people to read all the time. What if you noticed someone holding the paper at arm’s length and offer them reader glasses? They will be grateful and I bet will tell everybody about your thoughtfulness.
I know this doesn’t rank at the top of my marketing ideas, but give this one some thought and try to work it into your services.
From Wikipedia: Presbyopia is a condition where the eye exhibits a progressively diminished ability to focus on near objects with age. Presbyopia’s exact mechanisms are not known with certainty; the research evidence most strongly supports a loss of elasticity of the crystalline lens, although changes in the lens’s curvature from continual growth and loss of power of the ciliary muscles (the muscles that bend and straighten the lens) have also been postulated as its cause. Like gray hair and wrinkles, presbyopia is a symptom caused by the natural course of aging.