In today’s episode, I take you to the front lines of the ski trade to share some fundamental verities revealed by skiers’ behavior and comments from the boot bench. My in-depth research uncovers the fact that women are better than men, that skiers will endure unspeakable pain in order to avoid buying new boots, that the Returning Skier phenomenon, first revealed in these pages, is very real indeed, and that ski buyers tend to be terrible researchers due to the fact that ski journalism is all but dead in its mainstream incarnations.