Now buying new eyeware. I write from the UK.
Eye test: £22 / $40:
Verifocals: £184 / $334;
Coating (for VDU and suchlike): £52 / $94;
Frames: £30 to £200 / $54 to $364
A buddy tells me so-called designer frames are wholesaled $1 to $2 into retail opticians who onsell at $300.
Can the price of frames be true? Might you have the real information?
Thank you in anticipation,
Compliments from, er, Here.
I do not know for a fact if this is true but I have never heard of any product that gives the retailer a 15,000% margin.
Have you factored in the cost of keeping the shop?
As a gneral rule of thumb, anything that “a buddy tells you” is wrong.
While I doubt that the retail markup is THAT high, a larger question remains:
WHY is the price of eyeglass frames so seemingly out of line?
I’ve always had a sneaking suspicion that SOMEBODY is getting very rich on them.
I’m sure that the profit margins are quite large (I can’t imagine that it really costs $100/pair), but eyeglasses are precision-gound optics, so I seriously doubt that they only cost a dollar to make.
Prescription drugs, OTOH, can and do have markups of 1000% or more.
I worked in an optical lab about 1971, and they also wholesaled frames. So adjust all figures I give accordingly, but I imagine the ratio of glasses cost to Consumer Price Index is pretty much the same.
In 1971, a typical pair of single-vision glasses, plastic frames, modest prescription (+4 to -4 diopters, sphere) cost about $100 at a U.S. optometrist. Gold-filled glasses were typically $50 more. This was before the discount stores like Lenscrafters, who started selling cheap knockoffs for $50. Of course, these are only crude values for prices, as I remember them; YMMV.
Our lab charged $5 to make two lenses and insert them into the frames. Typical frames were wholesaled to the optometrist at $1.80 each. Gold-filled frames, the most expensive ones we carried, sold for $6.00.
Yes, the markup was fantastic. And the optometrist that owned the lab had a chain of dispensing outlets and also owned the frame wholesaler, and his wife was one of his employees. And the cost of the glasses, lenses and frames didn’t include the cost of an optical examination. Overhead? For a 800-ft hole in the wall lab/warehouse? Not much. You can put a lot of frames and lenses in a room the size of your bedroom. Our entire lens stock fit in a single 4-drawer filing cabinet.
BTW, the lens blanks cost us $.30 each. These are large, circular glass lenses that we cut down to the shape and size dictated by the frames (the optical prescription/curvature was built-in and we didn’t make that – we just chose the correct one from the drawer). We had an automated machine driven by a cam mechanism. It used diamond cutters with a water jacket to grind the edges of one lens down in about 90 seconds, including the compound curve required to make them fit in the frames.
I’m sure today’s equipment is even more automated and it costs even less in time and money to make a custom-shaped lens.
That’s right, Diceman, those “precision-ground optics” cost 30 cents each. Our lab paid double that until they found sources in Japan that were just as good, and a lot cheaper.
How can optometrists get by with this high markup? For somewhat the same reasons doctors can. The laws severly restrict entry into the field. I can prescribe for myself just fine, but no optometrist will accept a prescription from me, since I don’t have the formal credentials.
Almost forgot. Here’s the secret to how eyewear is priced. First, you visit the optometrist.
Now there is an art to customer relations. If the victim, oops…I mean, customer, doesn’t react, the dialogue might go like this:
“Say, Doc, I need new glasses. How much?”
“About $100.”
“…for the frames. The lenses will be another $100.”
“Each.”
“…plus the exam…”
I used to work for my dad who is an optometrist back in the late 70s, and I still remember the pricing structure to this day…Double the wholesale price and add $10; therefore, $10 wholesale became $30 retail, $20 became $50, etc…
He also taught me how to cut, bevel and heat-treat lenses and put them into the frames and he paid me a handsome amount of $5 per hour back then…(I was 14 at the time, so that was GOOD money!)…It all came to a screetching halt however when I heat-treated some revolutionary new lenses that just hit the market…er, plastic lenses… :eek: …I was sent back to pulling weeds and cleaning toilets after that and a major career change took place on that day… 
Damn :eek: That’s as bad as prescription medicine! I was guestimating something in neighborhood of $10 - $20 per pair!
If the markup were anything like that, my uncle the optician would not have given up his own shop to work for a pittance for Wal-Mart, 6 days a week. I imagine it’s significant’, but nothing like 15,000%.
(Besides, sounds like you’re paying too much for your glasses. I think mine were $140 total, including antireflective coating, and they were far from the cheapest in the shop. That didn’t include the eye exam, though.)
Where do you go, and do you wear funky New York-style glasses?
[aside] I read an article in the paper this past weekend that described a woman a lot like I imagine you, if you were from Latin America…[/aside]
Appropriately: Cheap Fast Eyeglasses from a Desktop Fabricator
I was in NYC right after I had my last eye exam, and feeling annoyed that all the frames I saw around here (Chicago) either looked the same, or cost $400. Then it so happened that I was walking down 8th Street in the Village and saw a cool pair in the window, on sale. They were a little bit different, but not too far out - they are pretty basic oval-shaped, but very dark green metal. I’d been hoping for blue, or purple, but these were the perfect combination of relatively cheap and a little bit different, but not too weird for my rather conservative workplace. Bonus: in NYC, prescription glasses have no sales tax.
I paid about the same amount for Pentax quality lenses in rimless frames (which are usually pretty spendy at eyeglasses.com.
What do you consider “New York-style”? The heavy rims that get called “emo” nowadays, but back in the middle of the 20th century I’ve heard were called “birth-control” glasses?
Thank you very much for the personal experience detail from Yeticus Rex and Musicat.
Best wishes from, er, here.