Fuck you GlassesUSA!
My glasses fell apart after a month and they say that they’ll replace them for 50% plus shipping. I should have known better than to buy glasses online.
May I be the first to point out that your avatar is in direct contradiction of your post?
That said, while I do not yet need glasses, I can sympathise, glasses are not cheap.
I’m going to ignore your first point.
Regarding your second point, yes glasses are expensive. I suspect that the markup is beyond unconscionable.
I don’t know this website, but have been happy with Zenni Optical for price, quality, and customer service. Buying glasses online beats the hell out of $200 glasses at a store.
Thanks for the earworm: I’m imagining The Beach Boys singing the title of this thread.
Everybody’s got glasses
Glasses USA!
Glasses are incredibly cheap to make. The companies all use the same blanks and the polishing and grinding machines spit out your lenses in no time. That is why most on line shops will include the plastic lenses for free.
I recently was working on my car and removed my glasses and put them on the driver’s seat. And of course, I put my hand on them and, I thought, bent them. So I pulled my outdated prescription out of the drawer and rushed a new set from Zenni Optical. Turns out the old glasses were fine, they later popped back into place.
$40 bucks including the rush shipping. Then I later thought that I really liked the style of my older glasses, which were still fine once they popped back into place, so I ordered a new set of Cole Haans. $160 bucks, same free plastic lenses. I guess you pay for the style.
But what I realized was that the whole “prescription” for glasses is a farce or scam. Mine was outdated by 3 or 4 years and no company gives a shit as long as you can enter the settings properly. So why should I go to see the eye doctor if my current set works? Why do I need a prescription? Are these glasses going to be dangerous if I continue to use my current prescription? Perhaps I need to look into a machine while the doctor gives me new examples and asks, “does this look better, or worse?” “How about now?” Other than that magic machine you are creating your on settings/prescription.
I understand that there are reasons that your eyes should be looked at by a doctor periodically. What I do not understand is why this exam is not a part of my regular doctor check up.
The whole magic devise we look into at the eye doctor should be able to be replaced with a kiosk at Safeway. Look into it, adjust the view like you would focus binoculars, and print the settings or order the glasses.
Of course, it is the money. I do not understand how this entire industry has not been replaced.
Because optometry is not as simple as memorizing 1 vs. 2, and medical doctors are not trained in it (and in fact go to different schools). You need new glasses, and machines can only do so much, because we are remarkably adept at becoming habituated to poor vision while consciously claiming that your vision is fine.
As for the glasses industry, there is some snake oil, all the different brands are made by primarily only a few companies, Luxottica being the biggest one who makes lots of the designer brands.
Server error double post.
They’re incredibly cheap for most people - some of us have multiple issues that genuinely makes ours more difficult to produce and inherently more expensive. Although I pay about 1/3 for my lenses than I did 40 years ago due to the production process becoming much more automated.
The issue with needing a prescription is more for contact lenses than for spectacles. Contact lenses, being in contact with your eyeball, can be more of a problem and even if the prescription hasn’t changed having a doc look at any eyeball constantly exposed to a foreign object might catch problems before they become catastrophic. Or maybe not. The point being that contacts do have more risks than spectacles.
In fact, you do not need a prescription at all to purchase spectacles. Many stores sell “readers” or “cheaters” that you select all on your own. The advantage of getting a script for eyeglasses is that they will be custom made for you. This most likely will give you better results, just as custom-tailored clothing usually looks better than off the rack. Off the rack (for clothes or reading glasses) is often plenty good enough for most people, but some want or need more than that.
If you go up to Zenni type in whatever you want or think will work for you - no one will check up on you if it’s eyeglasses you’re buying. It would be silly to get something way off from your needs, of course, but you’re free to do that.
It’s like shoes - you’re free to select whatever shoes you want. Most people want comfort, but a few idiots opt for, say, a size 5 even though they’re really a size 8. Some people, though, really do need stuff like custom-fitted orthotics.
Because your primary care provider is not trained to fine-tune an eyeglass prescription. I’m sure they are capable of learning, they just haven’t undergone the training for reasons probably having as much to do with custom and tradition as anything else.
Heck, my eye doctor has a machine that scans your eyeball and does 90% of that work all on its own, I don’t have to adjust anything. The other 10% is working up a solution for integrating what’s needed for my myopia, astigmatism, and presbyopia. There are different options particularly for the presbyopia depending on what work, hobbies, and activities I engage in.
The other problem I have is my lenses are very thick, even when using thin lens technology. As a result I must have full frames - I can’t use half-frames, they just won’t last/hold the lenses. I’ve looked into Zenni and about 2/3 of their frames simply can’t be trusted to hold the lenses I need. But I fully admit I’m an outlier. Which is why I go to an ophthalmologist (when my insurance covers it/I can afford it), an MD specializing in eyes, rather than a storefront optometrist. Said doctor not only gives my a custom-fitted pair of glasses that gives me 20/20 vision, she checks me over for problems that I’m at higher than average risk for.
Once someone has experienced corrected vision, it blows my mind how they cannot know they need new glasses. I start getting itchy before I have even moved a quarter of a point.
“Doc, objects 100 feet away in dark rooms are not sharp as a tack, I need new glasses!”
It’s really not a fault in our visual system but a feature. It is designed to make things as automatic as possible and your own blur is something that can be tuned out by our perception, as long as it isn’t severe enough to overcome our mechanisms.
Frames seem to have gone way downhill this last decade. Can’t reshape plastic with metal inserts for love or money. The metal always wins, so the frames slide off your face, and the cheapass hinges crack out of the frames, or just plain shatter. Spending more money does not help any more.
I broke my last set of glasses around the end of November. They were older, scratched up a bit, and I needed a new exam anyway. Robin’s usual place is open Monday through Friday for 4 hours per day, one of which is the lunch hour when nobody is there, which I found out the hard way when I went to pick up my last set of glasses. I decided that I was not going to deal with such absurdly inconvenient hours, so I looked up places which would take our insurance.
I chose Pearle Vision. I thought the convenience of being in a mall near to work would offset the slightly higher prices I knew they would charge.
Thus began the ordeal.
I made an appointment for an eye exam. They couldn’t take me until 26 December. Such is life, so I went, got the exam, which was actually rather modern and kind of neat in a technological sort of way. I went out into the showroom, picked my frames and add-ons (I got Transitions like I always do), suffered through the modest sticker shock, paid the bill, and was told it would be 10-14 business days until they came in.
Keep in mind that to this point I had been without glasses for nearly a month to this point. My eyes aren’t horrible, but I can’t clearly read road signs until I’m on top of them and I can’t read the score of the football game from across the room. Additionally, I was getting monstrous headaches and I was getting very tired very early. But that’s on me, so I was willing to be patient.
Two weeks later I hadn’t heard anything, so I went in only to be told that the weekends and New Year’s Day were not business days, so they were not late as yet. I went a week later and still nothing. So now I’m really getting annoyed. Robin calls because I can’t trust myself not to tell them that I’m coming in with a flamethrower to burn the place down. She is told that the glasses were sent to the wrong place, then back to the lab, but they would be overnighted so I could get them ASAP. That was last Thursday.
Overnighting apparently doesn’t count weekends or King Day, either. I finally got them on Wednesday, almost a calendar month later, and the guy said he was juuuuuuuuust about to call me, just like all the other times he called me. Oh, wait, we had to call him.
Anyway, the moral of the story is that their customer service is atrocious. I mean, why would anybody go to get glasses? Because they can’t fucking see. But hey, it’s only a month, and it’s not their problem, right? Never again. Never. Again. Until the next time, of course, which is when I try a different place and find out it’s no better.
Airman Doors, I’ve had good luck for years with ‘America’s Best’ Always get tnem inside a week. Walk in, no appt, exam. As long as you know how to pick good frames, they do a great, fast job. I’ve never even considered a flamethrower.
I used to wear glasses until 2001 when I got laser surgery. I don’t recall how much they always were because my insurance from work paid for a large portion of it.
This.
My daughter-in-law took our grandson there. Free eye exam and 2 pairs of glasses in nice frames for $69. I don’t think that’s bad at all.