A few years back I think Consumer Reports did a comparison and Lenscrafters actually beat out the independent shops in accuracy of the lenses. Personally, I use them because I’ve never had a problem and they really do stand behind their 30 day guarantee. You bring the glasses back for ANY reason and they’ll replace them. I once bought a pair of sunglasses and decided a week later that I hated the way they looked and they replaced them with no questions asked and absolutely no charge. This time, I got progressives and it gave me peace of mind to know that if I hated them I could just bring them back and replace them with regular distance lenses. The main problem I have is that they don’t always stock my astigmatism so I do have to wait to have them ordered.
So, does the consumer have a right to expect more than “within tolerance”? Is within tolerance good enough for the casual user? The professional prescription with the best measurement available to optometry will vary in a patient over 24 hours by more than the industry tolerance, and the Rx is rounded to the nearest quarter of a diopter, so how good does it have to be?
Tolerances for optical goods, like most other industries, are determined by ANSI (PDF), so no need to put it in quotation marks.
The differences that most people can tolerate in a colloquial sense is far greater than ANSI allows, and if we were to get caught dispensing specs that were outside tolerance we’d lose our certification. Which is an even bigger deal in states that have licensure.
OP here – One factor I forgot to take into account is that I’m extremely nearsighted and, in order to avoid wearing Coke-bottle glasses, I pay extra for some sort of super-refractive lenses. LensCrafters said those lenses take 2 weeks to get. So right after lunch, I’m heading over to my regular guy.
If the lenses are still intact, an eyeglasses store might be able to fit them in new frames.
Local guy says they’ll be ready in a week; LensCrafters said two.
Local guy: $409; I didn’t get a price from LC because the two weeks was a deal breaker, but early on she had said “probably around five or six hundred.”
Local guy 2, LensCrafters 0
Thanks. It’s a good suggestion, but
-
I have a new prescription anyway; I just hadn’t gotten around to sending it in until the breakage made it imperative.
-
I spent over a year trying to find circular frames that were the right size and had the lenses the right distance apart (nobody carries circular (not “round,” circular) frames off the rack). And the frames I gave him to put the new lenses into are slightly smaller than the ones I’m wearing, so just transferring the lenses wouldn’t have worked.
And, BTW, he repaired the broken frames. The fix probably won’t last forever, but it should last a week.
I got to deal with a lot of unsatisfied LensCrafters customers over the years. My favorite incident:
I started out working for a small independent shop - 7 employees including the owner and his wife (who just did the bookkeeping at home). We had an undeserved reputation for being high priced (the markup on glasses is nowhere near what most people seem to think), and we had a standard 20% discount for a second pair.
A guy who knew my boss came in with two pairs of specs he’d gotten at LensCrafters on a buy one get one free deal, showed my boss his receipt and smugly asked if he could beat that. My boss got our lens price sheet, pulled the frame off the shelf (it just happened to be a frame we carried) and totaled up two pairs, one regular price and the second 20% off. It came to a little over half of what he paid at LensCrafters.
And a week is still too long on most prescriptions. Even on high index progressives turnaround time was rarely more than 3 business days (except for glass lenses) at every place I ever worked.
As others have said, LensCrafters will get you those glasses in an hour or two. I got a couple pairs of reading glasses there a couple months back - they told me it would be 2 hours, but they texted me just under 1 hour later to say they were ready. (I’m using those glasses right now. They’re great, if a bit pricey.)
The one drawback of LensCrafters - and most eyeglass shops these days, including the small private ones I’ve looked at - is that the cost of frames has gone through the roof. LensCrafters was full of all sorts of designer-name frames, starting at $200 and going up from there, and one tiny rack of ‘bargain’ frames, starting at $100. (Same was true of two local eyeglass places I went to at the same time, only the prices were even higher at the private shops. And this was in Dunkirk, MD, not in anywhere ritzy.) Apparently if you want those cheap black nerdy frames that used to be common when I was growing up, you’ve got to special-order them or something. So even before you pay your first penny for the skilled work that goes into making the lenses - the part I’m more than willing to pay good money for - you’re already paying out a bundle.
That’s why I wound up going to Wal-Mart for my bifocals: I could get frames I really liked, for $59 IIRC. Same for the Firebug, who needed his first pair of glasses. The thought of spending $200 or more for a pair of frames for a 10 year old just totally blew my mind.
WallyWorld wasn’t any cheaper for the lenses, which was fine, because the savings on the frames was so huge. And while I realize Wal-Mart deals in volume so they can get good prices, surely so does LensCrafters, so they should be able to offer frames at, say, 20% over Wal-Mart’s price, and the local shops should be able to do Wal-Mart + 50%.
I’ve been getting my frames online — because of the shape, as I said, but the prices turned out to be amazing.
Yes, I had to buy and return a bunch of them because they didn’t fit around my head or because the lenses were much farther part than my eyes are. But when I found something that worked, I bought a bunch in silver, gold, and gun-metal.
The one receipt I can find right now tells me that one of the pairs cost $10. I’m sure the rest were similar, given the number I bought. So yeah, I’m perfectly happy to spend a bunch of time ordering and returning if it gets me $10 frames that last almost four years (the receipt is from Dec. 2013; the ones I wore every day broke in Sept. 2017).