06/24/2024
At Affordable Red Light Therapy, our mission was to help folks heal from the inside-out, at the cellular level by using red, near-infrared and blue light therapy. We were here to help folks heal any skin issues, reduce any scars, fine lines, stretch marks, eliminate acne, relieve any muscle or joint pain, improve your overall health and wellness through Red Light Therapy, also known as Biomodulation.
Red light therapy is for the whole family ... even pets! If you have a child with a scraped knee, red light therapy can help speed up tissue repair and wound healing. If you have a teen with acne or any embarrassing scars or chronic skin conditions like psoriasis, red light therapy can help your body repair these conditions - from the inside out. Adults can use red light therapy to regrow thinning hair, achieve better skin health, reduce the appearance of stretch marks or other scar tissue, and even weight loss (though that's a long-term goal that requires regular sessions). If you have an aging pet with mobility issues, soothing red light therapy sessions can relieve their joint pain and repair many skin issues as well.
I sincerely hope everyone has the means and an opportunity to give red light therapy a try, and not just once, but on a regular basis. I tried to offer it as my daughter and I had to travel more than an hour away when we first discovered it. Unfortunately, we were ahead of our times. Not enough folks locally understood how it worked, or how much it could help them. I was not able to convince enough folks to give it a try and between the high cost to keep the business open and not enough folks utilizing it, I was not able to sustain this business.
The devices are readily available for personal home use now and that was another challenge trying to run this business. Why pay $100's of dollars for something you can buy and do at home, everyday when it's convenient for you? There are even hand-held devices that are very affordable you can use to target specific areas if you can't afford a full body panel.
My daughter suffers from MS and I have osteoarthritis and severe disabling joint pain. Red light therapy was the only thing that helped relieve some of the worst pain we ever experienced. No medicine from doctors was even touching our pain! Red light therapy started healing us from the inside out, reducing and ultimately eliminating some of the pain I was experiencing.
It is my hope that small towns will be more supportive of small local businessess but at this time, it is too costly to try and keep this business going.
Small towns need to be more friendly to small businesses. Stop all the zoning and arbitrary by laws that prevent someone from getting started. The "Special Permit" is not an option for a small start-up business. Who can afford to buy a property before finding out if they can operate their business at that site, just because the town has some outdated list of businesses deemed acceptable to operate? We looked at several properites in many different towns and ran into these rediculous requirements that would have required us to buy a property before even being able to apply for a Special Permit to find out if we would be able to open a business at that location. No startup small business has the funds to do that - and take into account that the typical "Special Permit" process takes 6 months or more, and that's if no one objects to it! All it takes is one hateful/spiteful neighbor to say, "Not in my back yard" and the Towns cave to the naysayer.
Unfortunately the Town of Palmer Administrators did not understand Red Light Therapy - how it worked, the fact there was no special license required, and refused to issue me a $60 Business License to open. After 8 weeks of unnecessary delays, I was ultimately forced to go through the State of MA and pay $500 to get a business license to operate, which made my start up costs more than they needed to be.
Government is supposed to work FOR THE PEOPLE, not make our lives harder!
Then one day in January 2024 I had one of the most disrespectful customers write a less than thruthful review based solely on her uninformed perception, which cured me from wanting to help anyone else. She was offered goggles to protect her eyes, but refused to wear them (they were left hanging in the booth with her, but clearly she refused to wear them), then wrote in a review how the lights were so bright it made her closter phobic (mind you my red light therapy booth was a series of movable wall panels with no door and no ceiling in a room 20' x 20' with a 10' ceiling)! She complained in her review how she couldn't stand for the session but neglected to sit on a bench that was right in the booth with her, or could have easily grabbed any of 3 chair options in the room with her, or she could have asked for help at any point during her treatment, but she didn't. She didn't even pay for the session, she was given a gift certificate from her Mother, which I gladly refunded the balance of upon receiving her negative review. Somehow, the Mother, rather than apologizing for her daughter’s disrespectful overly-emotional behavior, took offense to my refunding her gift certificate balance and then wrote her own negative review because I called out her daughter's less than truthful account of what really transpired. The Mother never even got to try red light therapy, because her self-centered daughter went first and then ran out in the middle of her session, which left the Mother unable to do her session, which they had scheduled back-to-back, which I reserved time for and took the trouble to prepare for, using the last of our heating fuel to warm the facility up for them. [My daughter and I went without heat for the next few days during a cold spell because we had used the last of our fuel to warm the house up for them.] To this day, I have no desire to help anyone after this experience.
The number of businesses that have declined since online reviews became a thing is truly sad and very shameful that we have allowed this to happen in our country. To own a small business was part of the American Dream for many immigrants. However, it's really hard to own and operate a business today given the high number of ill-informed consumers who don't know the difference between a company website vs. a Yelp or Google listing. They don't understand how costly it is to be able to accept credit cards or the state rules businesses have to follow in order to pass that cost back on to the consumer, and how many hoops the business owner has to jump between the Merchant Service Agreement, DOR/MA Tax Collect, General Liability Insurance, Unemployment and Federal requirements, in additional to all the local rules and regulations, involved in operating a business, not to mention the tax burden many small business owners are incurring. There's no paid vacation or sick time for the business owner either and if you’re too small to afford hiring staff, you have to handle everything, yourself, all in a day!
The last straw for me was how disrespectful I was treated by this Mother & Daughter duo.
Only other business owners know that Yelp & Google refuse to remove a business listing, even after the business has closed. Most consumers aren't even aware of how these sites operate. We don't choose to sign up for a listing, they automatically list ALL businesses. They look better to advertisers when they can say they have ###X # of businesses online.
There are no Federal or State regulations in place to hold these giant review sites accountable for their unfair practices. They require the business owner to have a photo and legal name but anyone can post a negative review using a fictitious name - no questions asked. They don't even have to be a customer to post a negative review! And when your real customers post positive reviews, Yelp and Google often hide those reviews and give more weight to the negative ones using an algorithm.
Until the Federal Government reins in these unscrupulous review sites, there are going to be fewer and fewer small businesses in America. The big box stores can afford to hire companies that can write positive reviews and they can afford to pay fees to squash the negative ones. Even though Yelp and Google say you can't pay to get rid of reviews, they lie! When you pay their egregious fees, they use a different algorithm that puts your favorable reviews at the top and your negative ones at the bottom. This is an unfair and unjust but well documented practice.
I wish more folks understood that negative reviews only hurt your small local businesses. No one looks at a Wal-Mart or Target review before shopping there. The giant corporations can also pass on the costs of cleaning up reviews to the consumer. There are companies that solicit these services, but small businesses can’t afford to pay those fees.
So, to all the foks who have the need to feel entitled to post your negative opinion (based on your sole-one-sided, often less than truthful, perspective), please know that you’re only hurting small businesses. So when you look around your community and you see fewer and fewer businesses and more empty places where small businesses used to be, know that you have contributed to that situation.
If you have a problem, CALL the Owner or manager and let them know how they can improve upon your experience. Be positive. Be a solution to the problem, instead of just the problem.
In a world where you can be anything, BE KIND! You never know all that someone else might be dealing with. And know that when you require more from a small business, you can expect to pay more – and you raise the cost of doing business for everyone. I tried to keep red light therapy affordable for anyone wanting to try it.
If you don’t have anything nice to say about a small business, keep your opinion to yourself. If you can’t find anything nice to say about a small business, stay home. Let the rest of us enjoy and thrive locally.
Thank you to anyone who bothered or cared enough to read this message.
