It’s so much fun to go into a store or restaurant in the Teche area and see the Best of the Teche certificates on the wall and know those are endorsements from actual customers. Voting is now completed for the 2018 Best of the Teche awards. We started voting online in 2016, and received 14,928 votes. Last year, the votes totaled 68,653, which we thought was awesome! Amazingly, you voted 183,294 times this year! I think that is phenomenal for a community of our size! 

I had the pleasure of monitoring the nominations, and, as a relative newcomer to the community, I’ve learned so much. It’s amazing what you can learn about an area based on the volume of nominations and voting in each category.

My first “a-ha” realization is that we have such a large and diverse collection of businesses! As I expected, volume is highest for the special overall awards; best customer service, best new business, most unique business, best place to work, and best local business. Best realtor and best apparel store are, as to be expected, highly competitive categories with lots of nominations. After that, there were several surprises!

First, the food and drink awards. The heaviest nominations and votes were for best fried seafood, best poboy, and, amazingly enough, best hotdog! Best hotdog? With all of the amazing food we have available here? I was surprised.

Not surprisingly, voting was heavy for best auto dealer for new cars, best bank, and best doctor’s office. But voting for best salon/barbershop and best stylist/colorist outnumber these! I cackled out loud when I saw that my own personal stylist was nominated in her category and also for best doctor’s office. I have to agree — an hour or two in her chair is some mighty powerful medicine!

Some categories with heavy activity are a reflection on our community. For instance, best place to take the kids far outperforms best place for a romantic date. This makes sense in a very family-oriented community. But what I can’t make heads or tails out of — best girls night out has a lot of activity, but best guys night out has not one single business nominated! Do we not let them out of the house?

Seriously, the Best of the Teche awards aren’t possible without you, the readers. I hope you’ve already bought your tickets for our Best of the Teche event on August 3rd, because we are sold out! We will gather together with 650 local business owners, professionals, friends, and family to celebrate all of our finalists. If you don’t have your tickets, you can still find out who won in the Sunday, August 5th edition of The Daily Iberian.

 

CHRISTINA PIERCE is publisher of The Daily Iberian.