After decades as a hunter and shooter and 15 years in this industry as a marketing professional, writer, consultant and resource for friends and acquaintances, I am confident in one thing above all else.
The delta between what the average hunter or shooter knows about optics and what they think they know is greater than in any other product category in the hunting and shooting space. Frankly, I don’t think it’s even especially close.
This creates a unique problem for retail stores. Not because the customer doesn’t know what they are talking about — those customers can actually be quite fun to work with, as they often want to learn. When it comes to optics, people think they know what they’re talking about. That is infinitely worse. Give me humble ignorance over misplaced bravado any day of the week and twice on Sunday.
Where the blame lies for the miseducation of our optics customers matters less than charting the path forward — in part because that failure has come through many hands, but also because the last purchase matters less than the next.
Our job is to help customers be more informed the next time they make a purchase. To that end, we’re going to examine some of the most cringe-inducing lies I see people tell themselves about optics and discuss how you can gently correct and re-educate those customers to be better optics shoppers moving forward.
Lie #1 – “I just need more magnification…”
The chances of more magnification solving your problems are roughly the same as me passing a golden egg tomorrow morning. People like to assume that magnification will let them see things better, and if they could just see the target better, they would hit it more often.
Probably not.
Magnification doesn’t just magnify the target — it magnifies everything. It magnifies your heartbeat, your breathing, the sway of a tree, subtle changes in grip, all of it. Very few people do better under a microscope, and guess what a microscope uses to work? Incredibly high levels of magnification. Have you ever heard “being under a microscope” used in a positive context?
We often hear archers talking about target panic, but it’s absolutely a thing with firearms as well. When that reticle just doesn’t look to settle into place because you have your scope cranked up to 25X on a 100-yard shot, it looks like it’s dancing all over the place.
Your grip tightens. Your heart starts racing. The reticle movement speeds up.
How many problems is that magnification jump solving for you, Sparky?
You know the shots your customers are likely to have in the field in your area. You can ask the gun they’re shooting. I’m hard-pressed to recommend a scope over 10X in the vast majority of the country. Even in the West, 15X is going to cover the vast majority of shots and shooters. For most situations and skill levels, those magnifications are “safe” and avoid the worst of the magnification complications.
We didn’t even talk about overall quality of many optical systems above 24X, the expense of good scopes in those ranges, and all the fringing, vignetting, low-light issues, and aberrations that show up so much more easily in those higher-power setups.
Mention that to your customers when they start asking about high-magnification models. If they can’t explain why that doesn’t apply to their situation, they aren’t qualified to move to that kind of a scope. Making that sale is going to result in an unhappy customer. Best-case scenario, they blame the product and not you, but who sold them that product?
You’re on the hook either way.
Lie #2 – “______’s glass is so much better than ______’s glass…”
This is going to break some hearts, but we need to globalize this idea a little bit. It doesn’t matter what industry we’re talking about, or what product category — there are fewer hands involved than people think.
I spent some time in the medical industry. It took very little time to realize how many medical institutions are just silos on a bigger farm. From the outside, you can’t tell. But once you start trying to get to decision makers and inside power structures, you realize that in a given area, medical care revolves around just a couple networks, and that realization is horrifying.
The same goes for food makers, auto manufacturers, and myriad other consumer good and service industries. Including optics.
Optics is no different than any other product category. If you get far enough up the supply chain, you will find common suppliers among many brands.
Brand X does not have a secret glass factory. Neither does Brand Y. They source their glass from one of a handful of places on earth that make optical glass, and put them into optical systems that are very likely used by multiple brands, and then the final details like reticle or turret design, tooling, and aesthetics are brand-specific.
Like it or not, the vast majority of those suppliers and builders are located in Asia.
That isn’t to say that every scope on the market is a carbon copy of another scope. There are differences in design and performance. The reality, however, is that these differences are in the margins. It’s not the glass. It’s not the scope chassis. It’s little things.
You can get hung up on the devil in those details, or can you look at the upside; There’s never been a better time to be a consumer of optics. The floor for optical performance has come up so much in the last 25 years as to be laughable. Run-of-the-mill models of today run circles around virtually anything but the most premium offerings of the ’70s and ’80s.
Yes, even the ones being made in Asia, including China.
You know the product in your case, so don’t be afraid to push a little on a customer’s preconceived notions. Most customers don’t know what to look for when looking at optical performance. They can’t spot spherical aberration, even if explained. They can’t see chromatic aberration. They haven’t trained their eyes to examine edge-to-edge clarity.
We all know that the quality of the product in your store is well beyond the beliefs of the customer. Get them to look at options they think they aren’t interested in, and make them explain what’s wrong with what you’re handing them.
Is it clean? Is it bright? Is it clear? Can you trust the warranty? Is it a reputable brand?
Great. Anything in your store ticks those boxes. If they want to get hung up on “this glass versus that glass,” they’re just telling you all they don’t know. You can try to explain it, but we know about leading horses to water.
Lie #3 – “______ would be the perfect scope…”
Everything in life is a trade-off. Few places is this as evident as in optics. Sure, we all want a 1-30X scope, that weighs 10 ounces, is just eight inches long, has great clarity, and offers 200 clicks of adjustment in every direction.
We also want a paycheck with no taxes taken out, a truck that gets 300 miles to the gallon, the ability to eat all the tacos we want without getting fat, and television sitcoms that are funny again.
None of the above are going to happen.
There is no perfect scope. Optical physics limit what is possible. When you wish for one thing, it is going to negatively affect another aspect of the scope. You want a scope to be lightweight, you’re going to be limited on how much magnification it has. Has to perform in low-light conditions? You’re going to have a larger objective to promote a suitable exit pupil, (which is a whole article of its own!). Want a big, robust chassis? It’s going to be a heavy scope.
Optics is about find the balance that suits your use case. Too often shoppers start with the wrong question. We get, “I just bought a new 30-06, what scope do I need?”
It’s the wrong question. Optics are use-case based, not caliber-based.
That same 30-06 rifle would be just as at home in the dense evergreen forest of Quebec hunting black bear at 50 yards as it would be in western Nebraska chasing pronghorn at 300 yards. Is the same scope going to do both of those things well? Probably not.
The question isn’t “What rifle is it going on?” It’s “What are you using this rifle for?”
Now, you have a use case. Now you can find the Goldilocks scenario that balances the features of the scope with the benefits needed in the field to let you properly weigh the pluses and minuses of those decisions.
That hypothetic 30-06 might need a compact 1-6X LPVO, or a big 3-24×56 to reach out and touch the moon. Neither is a wrong answer, because there is no perfect scope. There is just the best scope for a given job.
Lie #4 – “Close is good enough…”
Scopes, and optics in general, are precision devices. Good enough rarely is.
As mentioned earlier, the devil is in the details, and that’s true with mounting as much as anything. The specific torque recommendations are there for a reason. Too little torque means the scope can move in the rings. Too much may cause internals to bind.
Eyeballing a reticle level is fine for 50-yard shots at deer-sized game.
Try hitting that 10-inch plate at even 500 yards if your reticle is off by a degree or two. Forget about 1,000 yards, or a mile.
“How far did you adjust this scope to get it on target?”
The answer to this question tells you a lot about the type of customer you’re dealing with, and how the rest of the conversation is going to go. If it’s any version of “I just cranked until the bore sighter was lined up,” you’re in trouble.
Sure, there is a lot of adjustment in some scopes, but that doesn’t mean you should use it all. The goal should be as little adjustment as possible. And no matter how much adjustment you make, you should know how much adjustment you made.
Every optics brand I’ve ever worked with or spoken to has had an eerily similar figure when it came to warranty work on scopes. Right around 80% of scopes that were returned for warranty were because of POI issues, and 80% of those were overadjusted. That’s a shocking figure, or should be, and I’ve yet to talk to an optics brand for whom that was not the case, give or take a few percentage points.
Details matter, and cranking away on turrets until you’re at the outer limits of adjustment is just asking for trouble.
I have a joke, that’s only kind of a joke, that I love to share with my friends at firearms manufactures. It goes like this.
Do you know why scopes have turrets?
Because gun makers can’t make anything level, flush, or true.
If every bolt face, barrel and crown were flawless, and every scope could be mounted perfectly in line with that perfect action, and every bullet was pure as the wind-driven snow, we wouldn’t need turrets on scopes. Stars and shooting components would align perfectly and every bullet downrange would be on an exact, predictable path that we could count on 100 times out of 100.
But that isn’t reality. Guns, bullets, and, yes, even scopes, are manufactured with certain tolerances that are acceptable every step of the way.
The difference between the bullets and guns and the scopes is that the scopes are asked to take up all that tolerance stack and account for it. That is what the process of sighting a gun in actually is: Pairing this gun with this bullet and this scope, firing it, examining the effects of tolerance stack on the complete firing system, then correcting for it with the turrets so the end result (where the shot lands) is charted and as predictable as possible.
Through that lens, doesn’t it make you want to invest in a Real Avid or Wheeler torque driver and a good plumb bob to level reticles?
We shouldn’t let perfection be the enemy of good enough, but we can’t pretend that our inputs to the process don’t matter. Customers who take a “good-enough” approach to optics typically assume the rifle and ammunition are infallible.
When introduced to reality, they’re back on your doorstep asking why this rifle won’t group and blaming you and the scope that you sold them. Nine times out of 10, it’s the optic that gets blamed, regardless of process or details. Then, back at the warranty shop, 80% of the time, we find that isn’t the case.
Details matter. Precious few hunters and shooters pay attention to them. Internet forums are positively overflowing with the proof.
There’s More…
When you’re talking about all the things people get wrong with optics, it would take a book to cover the entire spectrum. We don’t have that kind of space, but what we’ve discussed here hits the biggest problems with the largest impacts downrange.
If we can all help educate just a few shooters in the coming year, and those people can spread a better gospel of optics, we might wake up in a few years in a better world where more people understand optics in a more complete and holistic way.
It’s a bit of a stretch goal, but good optics and sound optics use help you reach out just a little bit further than you can without them.
And isn’t that the point?
3 Options to Stock
Cover all the bases for your customer’s needs with a good better best assortment from multiple brands. This gives the best coverage and offers the best selection.
Leupold VX-4HD
There’s a lot of peace of mind that comes from investing in a scope with the gold band, and the new VX-4HD from Leupold is a tremendous extension of that legacy. The 4:1 zoom ratio provides solid adjustment for hunting applications, and with 3-12×40, 3-12×50 and 4-16×50 configurations available, this model really speaks to the needs of the modern hunter. The Elite Optical System maximizes available light at dawn and dusk when game is active, and the integrated throw lever makes adjusting magnification easier than ever. A total of seven models are available in this new family. MSRP – $799-$1,199 www.leupold.com
Riton 3 Primal 3-15×44 LW
If weight is a consideration, look no further than the 3 Primal Lightweight offering from Riton. Coming in at less than 21 ounces, the 3-15 chassis is great choice for virtually any hunting application, with the low end for up-close encounters, and enough magnification to challenge your shooting skill and the capability of your round. The balance between weight and performance makes it a natural choice for those lightweight rifles that you don’t want to weigh down with bulky optics. Don’t forget about the Riton warranty, either. It’s a Fully-Transferable Unlimited Lifetime, with no carve-out for their dots or electro-optics. MSRP – $659 www.ritonoptics.com
Vortex Crossfire 3-9×40
There’s a reason the 3-9×40 chassis has been so popular for so long, and it isn’t hard to understand. For most hunters in most situations, it delivers everything they need without a bunch of mess they don’t. The exit pupil is great for low-light conditions, and contrary to what social media says, most hunters still aren’t taking 500-yard shots. That means a quality 3-9 chassis, from a reputable brand like Vortex, is just what the doctor ordered, more often than not. Valuable reliability can’t be overrated. MSRP – $259 – www.vortexoptics.com
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