We at the Scottsdale Hearing Center understand the appeal of shopping at big box store wholesale clubs. Wholesale clubs are experts at utilizing bulk purchasing power to sell goods at a discount. These big box wholesale club retailers can be an excellent option for shopping for groceries and household goods. But your hearing health needs are better addressed by an expert in hearing healthcare and audiology. Hearing loss and hearing health is a complex field, and hearing loss takes on many forms and patterns. The nature and degree of hearing loss, as well as an individual's preferences and other factors, will determine how best to treat their hearing loss. While the hearing aid dispensers at big box wholesale clubs are trained to perform a hearing test and fit a hearing aid, they lack the comprehensive education in audiology and hearing health possessed by an audiologist educated to the doctoral level. The chart below shows the difference in education and training required for a hearing aid dispenser in the state of Arizona and for an audiologist. At the Scottsdale Hearing Center, an audiologist will work closely with you to assess the extent and nature of your hearing loss and will then work closely with you to determine which hearing aid solution will be the best fit for you.
While big box store wholesale clubs may be able to offer a pricing advantage based on their large numbers of customers and a large volume of hearing aid sales, this large volume of hearing aid customers limits their ability to form a close working relationship between their hearing aid technicians and their customers. There may be multiple hearing aid technicians working at a given big box wholesale club location, so you are not guaranteed to see the same person that initially fitted you with hearing aids when you need to have an adjustment made to your hearing aids. At Scottsdale Hearing Center, we have one audiologist who performs all of our hearing aid exams, fittings, and adjustment, and you will work closely with this audiologist to ensure that your hearing aid experience exceeds your expectations.
At Scottsdale Hearing Center, you have access to Board-certified Ear, Nose, and Throat physicians who will ensure that your ears are healthy and that there are no medical conditions impacting your hearing. In addition, if you develop any ear-related issues while using your hearing aids, such as impacted ear wax, an ear infection, or a foreign body in the ear canal, our Ear, Nose, and Throat physicians are just down the hall, ready to assist you.
At Scottsdale Hearing Center, you have access to a variety of hearing aid options. Our audiologist can work with you to select a pair of hearing aids that work best for your individual pattern of hearing loss, as well as for your lifestyle and budget. We offer hearing aids for every budget from such manufacturers as Phonak, Oticon, Resound, and Signia. In addition, our audiologist will work with you to select features, such as tinnitus suppression, that are tailored to your specific situation. Contrast this with hearing aids purchased at a big box wholesale club, which are locked, so that they can only be programmed at the store from which they were purchased, and which are engineered to block features that may be helpful to certain patients. This is done to meet a price point that the big box wholesale club has articulated to the manufacturer.
