I hung up on my boss . It was a complete accident-my thumb slid across the “End Call” button while I was trying to adjust my scarf in the freezing wind-but the silence that followed felt like a confession. I haven’t called back yet. Not because I’m lazy, but because I’m currently stuck in the middle of a realization about systems and the way they fail us when we make a mistake. Or rather, the way they fail us when we aren’t exactly what they expect us to be.
In my line of work-retail theft prevention-systems are everything. We rely on the “typical” behavior of a shopper to identify the “atypical” behavior of a lifter. If ninety-nine people walk toward the milk, grab a carton, and head to the register, the system stays quiet. If the hundredth person walks toward the milk, pauses, looks at the ceiling, and then tucks a block of cheddar into their waistband, the system (and I) wake up.
But here is the problem: what if that hundredth person is just looking for a specific brand of milk their grandmother used to buy, and the cheese fell out of their hand because they have arthritis? The system sees an outlier and assumes a crime.
Systems are optimized for the 99%, often flagging the unique behavior of the 1% as an error or a threat.
The Digital Proxy
E-commerce has the opposite problem, but it’s just as damaging. Instead of assuming the outlier is a criminal, the e-commerce system simply pretends the outlier doesn’t exist. It does this through a small, orange or blue rectangle that carries more weight than it should: the “Bestseller” badge.
We have been conditioned to believe that popularity is a proxy for quality. We think that if ten thousand people bought a specific product, it must be the “best” one. But as someone who spends his days watching people struggle with automated gates and malfunctioning scanners, I can tell you that popularity is not a proxy for quality. It is a proxy for typicality. And if you are not typical, that badge is the most dangerous piece of advice you can follow.
The Phantom of the Average
Consider the case of a man I’ll call Selim. Selim has eyes that are, for lack of a better term, “difficult.” He has unusually flat corneas. He doesn’t know this, of course; he just knows that his vision always feels slightly “off” and his eyes feel like they’ve been rubbed with sandpaper by .
Every time Selim goes online to buy a new box of lenses, the website screams at him. It pushes a specific daily disposable lens to the top of the list. It has five stars. It has the “Most Popular” ribbon draped across the corner of its image.
Selim thinks, “Well, if everyone else loves it, it must be me. My eyes are the problem.” He buys the bestseller. He puts it in. Within , the lens is sliding around his eye because his flat cornea doesn’t provide the steep curve the “popular” lens was designed to grip.
The system-the algorithm-did its job perfectly. It showed the product that has the highest conversion rate for the highest number of people. But it failed Selim entirely because Selim is an outlier. The system was never built to see him. It was built to see the “average,” and in optics, the “average” is a ghost that no one actually possesses.
A Volume Game
The way these badges actually function is a bit of a “how it works” horror story for anyone who values precision. When you see a “Bestseller” tag, you aren’t looking at a clinical recommendation. You are looking at the result of a very basic database query. Behind the polished user interface, the server is running a script that looks something like this: it pulls a list of all products in a category, filters for the last thirty or sixty days, and then sorts them by the raw number of units shipped.
Sometimes, the logic is slightly more sophisticated-it might factor in the “velocity” of sales (how fast they are increasing) or the “return rate”-but at its core, it is a volume game. It doesn’t know that the person buying the lens has a base curve of 9.0 instead of the standard 8.4. It doesn’t know that the buyer works in a climate-controlled office with zero humidity, which makes a “popular” high-water-content lens dry out faster than a sponge in a desert. The badge is a reflection of the crowd, not a reflection of the individual.
In my world of theft prevention, we call this “masking.” A clever thief will often try to look as “typical” as possible to blend into the mass of people. The “Bestseller” badge performs a reverse-masking; it tries to force the unique buyer to blend into the mass of the product. It tells the consumer, “Don’t be different. Be like everyone else.”
But health isn’t a place where you want to blend in if your biology doesn’t match the mold. When you are dealing with something as delicate as a Lens, the “most popular” option is often the one that was designed to fit the 70% of the population that falls within a very narrow band of physiological measurements. If you are in the other 30%, that popularity is actually a warning sign. It means the product was engineered for someone who isn’t you.
The “Bestseller” represents a narrow band. For 3 out of 10 people, the most popular choice is the wrong choice.
The Practitioner’s Eye
This is where the human element-the practitioner’s eye-becomes the only thing that saves the outlier. I think about the history of a place like Ece Naz Optik, which has been sitting in the same physical location since . They’ve spent looking at actual human eyes. Not “data points.” Not “conversion metrics.”
They’ve seen the Selims of the world. They know that when someone comes in complaining about discomfort, the answer isn’t to give them the box that sold the most units that week. The answer is to find the one box that matches the specific, weird, “atypical” geometry of that person’s eye.
The digital arm of that experience, Lensyum, has to fight against the very nature of the internet. The internet wants to automate. It wants to give you the “Best Price” and the “Most Popular” choice because that’s the path of least resistance. But true expertise is the ability to tell a customer, “The most popular item on our site is actually the wrong choice for you.”
“The ‘Best’ camera is the $50 analog one with a physical sunshade. Popularity doesn’t solve physics.”
– Retail Theft Prevention Specialist
That is a terrifying thing for a salesperson to say, but it’s the only honest thing an expert can say. It’s like me telling my boss (once I finally call him back and apologize for the accidental hang-up) that the most expensive “AI-powered” security camera won’t work in our South Warehouse because the sunlight hits the lens at a 45-degree angle every afternoon and turns the image into a white blur. The “Best” camera is the $50 analog one with a physical sunshade. Popularity doesn’t solve physics.
The Tyranny of the Mean
We live in an era of “The Tyranny of the Mean.” We are constantly being nudged toward the center of the bell curve. We listen to the most popular songs, watch the most popular shows, and wear the most popular shoes. Most of the time, this is harmless. If I buy the most popular toaster and it’s mediocre, my toast is just slightly uneven. But vision is different. Vision is an intimate, mechanical interaction between a medical device and your living tissue.
If you are an outlier-and almost everyone is an outlier in at least one specific way-the “Bestseller” badge is a distraction. It’s a noise that drowns out the signal of your own body. If your eyes are telling you that the popular lens feels like a grain of sand, believe your eyes, not the badge.
When I finally work up the nerve to call my boss back, I’m going to explain that my phone’s “Easy-Touch” interface, which is supposed to be a “bestselling” feature for user-friendliness, is exactly what caused the mistake. It was designed for a “typical” thumb in a “typical” temperature. My frozen, atypical thumb didn’t fit the model.
We need to stop looking for the “Most Popular” and start looking for the “Most Correct.” Whether you are securing a warehouse or choosing the plastic that will sit on your pupil for , the only metric that matters is how well the solution maps to your specific problem.
The next time you see that bright, shiny badge on a screen, remember that it isn’t a recommendation for you. It’s a report on everyone else. And unless you’ve spent your whole life being exactly like everyone else, you might want to look at the second, third, or even the tenth item on the list.
The one that was made for the exception. The one that was made for the person who, like me, occasionally hangs up on the system because the system just doesn’t quite fit their hand.