NEW YORK—The Memorial Day holiday led to declines in ECPs’ gross revenue last week, May 31 to June 6, the 23rd week of 2021, according to data from Jobson’s latest Practice Performance Tracker. While the comparable 23rd weeks of 2019 and 2020 both exactly matched an average week for gross revenue (assigned an index value of 100) because neither included the Memorial Day holiday, and 2020 was also recovering from COVID’s impact by that time, gross revenue for this past week fell 17 index points below the levels achieved the past two years during the same time period.
 
All categories of optical sales experienced substantial decreases over the course of last week primarily due to the Memorial Day holiday. As usual, contact lens sales were the outlier, with sales declining at a lower rate than all other categories. Contact lens sales decreased at a rate of -8 index points, while all other categories’ sales declines ranged from -16 index points, for exams/refractions to -18 index points for lens pairs.
 
Steep declines in optical sales last week brought all categories to levels far below where they had been during an average week in 2019. With sales of contact lenses falling at less than half the rate of all other categories last week, they ended up at a higher level than three of the four other categories—frame units, lens pairs and exams refractions.
 
Jobson Optical Research selected 1,500 optical locations that have been operating and reporting their sales to its partners, GPN and ABB Analytics, since 2019. The index has been rebased to an average week in 2019. Going forward, this new index base will be used as an arbitrary benchmark and assigned a value of 100.
 
Click here to view the complete Jobson COVID-19 Performance Tracker