Yeah. I’ve been a Zenni customer for years and while it works great for me ($20 - $50 a pair depending on how ‘fancy’), other family members with crazier prescriptions either couldn’t be done at all or didn’t see much savings.
What works me for is just taking the best fitting pair I have and restricting myself to the same frame, arm, and nose widths and ordering multiple pairs. I can colour coordinate with my outfits if I really want to.
Well, we go to ODs and get P.D.s. Yeah, there were a couple of people assisting with things who might have been opticians but we do not “go” to an optician. The P.D. is on the pad with the Rx signed by the OD.
If I had blindly accepted a PD that an OD put on the pad I would have been fired on the spot. All measurements for fitting spectacles are the responsibility of the optician. Most ophthalmologists don’t put PDs on their Rxs for that very reason, because they don’t want their patients going to an incompetent optician.
This really needs to be explained to me. So there are competent and incompetent opticians. Patients presumably don’t know which are which. So if you get a good P.D. from an OD and go to an incompetent optician who does their own P.D. and gets it wrong then the patient is in luck (?) since the one from the OD is going to be ignored and the optician’s wrong one is going to be used instead.
Are there optology police outside optician’s offices checking Rxs and arresting the ones that have a P.D. on them?
How do you know that our P.D.s weren’t actually measured by someone with the qualifications of an optician or better during our visits? We got shuffled around to various gizmos and were examined by different people.
And have you been to a Four Eyes, LensCrafters or some such to buy glasses??? No optician has ever measured our eyes at those places. It’s the usual front counter staff only doing P.D., fittings and such.
You have extremely fixed views on the “ideal” way things should be done that don’t correspond to reality.
Just to provide people with a comparison, I went to Zenni and tried to match these specs:
There are more (and less) expensive frames, and more expensive options, but this seemed a fairly close match, at exactly half what Costco, one of the cheapest retail outlets, charges.
Just sayin’.
I paid more than $800 for my most recent glasses, and they are worth every penny. They are digital progressive lenses with a wide “sweet spot” and very little angular distortion. The optician fitted them so the strongest part of the prescription is slightly higher than where I look when staring at a screen, with the frame all the way up my nose. So they are a nice mid-distance prescription for working on a computer. But if I let the frame slide down just a little, I can comfortably focus on infinity, and read distant road signs when I drive.
I used to juggle among three pairs of glasses, one underpowered for work, one full strength progressive for general use, and one full strength single vision for movies and driving at night. Now I wear this one pair, and it works for everything.
I love my optician.
My frames were $56, so that’s not far out of line from Zenni. My lenses have all the stuff available, not sure if yours do. But my Costco price is lots better than most local shops.
GaryM
Absolutely. If there weren’t a Zenni option, I’d almost certainly go to Costco. But even adding some of the more expensive options at Zenni for impact resistance or anti-glare (I couldn’t be sure exactly what you got) brought the total only to about $150, about two-thirds of your price.
I think my 15 years in the field gives me a pretty good idea of how things should be and are done. No opticianry police, (unless you’re in a licensed state) but I did have an employer with a 40+ year reputation of being the place to go if you wanted your glasses done correctly. If the PD is wrong the place that made the specs is responsible to make it right regardless of where the wrong numbers came from. So whoever fills the prescription had better personally verify that those numbers are correct. Same goes for OC heights, vertex distances, and seg heights (which are all frame dependent, and can’t be done without having both the frame and the patient at hand).
There are a handful of states that license opticians. If you’re lucky enough to live in one of them, they have to prove competency to be licensed. Outside of those states, your best bet is to ask the staff if they are ABO certified. Certified opticians will be glad to show you their certificate. They’ll probably have it prominently displayed.
I’d never go to a chain for glasses, but if the “usual front counter staff” is doing P.D.s and fittings then they are representing themselves as opticians. At the place I worked the longest the only staff who wasn’t a certified optician was a bookkeeper.
Don’t know if anyone watches “Adam Ruins Everything”, but one of the episodes was about eyeglasses. They said designer frames are a big scam. All frames come from pretty much the same place.
Adam isn’t as smart as he thinks he is. It is true that for the most part designer frames are not actually designed by said designers (they do approve them), but it is not true that all frames come from “pretty much the same place”. Some are made in the U.S., some in China, some in Italy, some in Germany, depending on the brand. The cheap crap is mostly made in China. Most good quality frames are made in Europe.
Evidently stainless frames are the ones I have problems with. Went in for my annual exam yesterday and took along some very old (15 - 20 years) frames in for new lenses to use as a spare pair. Turned out that they’re titanium. The old frames no longer fit my face so I ordered new titanium frames with a similar style.
