Unhappily my age is showing and I recently went to get prescription eyeglasses. I do not have insurance for this so it was all out of pocket.
Not being used to eyeglass shopping I was shocked at their cost. By the time I left I was $300 poorer all for one pair of eyeglasses.
Note there is nothing particularly special about my prescription and my frames are not designer frames.
Now looking at glasses they do not seem to be a particularly expensive item to manufacture. The technology to make eyeglasses goes back to the 1600’s and optical reading aids may be 2000 years old. Surely with today’s technology a machine cranks these out and they use plastics instead of glass. The frame itself? C’mon…no feat of engineering or remarkable materials. Heck, you can get cheap glasses at most drugstores for a few dollars.
So why am I paying $300? I could buy a television for half that cost and the television has considerably more engineering to it, an optically correct hunk of glass (much larger than my glasses) and dramatically more complex assembly and far higher costs of shipping.
Just wondering if there is some monopoly going here because for the life of me I cannot see such costs represented in a simple pair of eyeglasses.
[sub]NOTE: I shopped around…prices were darn close to the same wherever I looked so this is not a case of me getting ripped off by an overpriced merchant. [/sub]
Unless you have bought some ‘designer’ frames you seem to have overpayed.
I have been down that road myself but have learned my lesson now.
Last pair (two pair,actually. Need a spare pair as I’m always misplacing them) £78 including the eye test.
I was tempted to post a thread recently asking why prescription glasses prices were so cheap compared to the past. I get mine through America’s Best, get the cheap frames, no scratch coating, etc.: $69 for two pair. Including eye exam. There’s also the aforementioned Eyeglass World, Wal-Mart Optical, and others, all usually having some sort of inexpensive (sub-$100) glasses. A big change from the $300 apiece that I had to pay in the '80s.
(And contacts are cheap, too-- I’ve progressed from normal soft contacts, used for a year, at over $200 plus $100 exam in the early '90s, to a year’s worth of toric disposables and exam for under $100.)
Well, a pair of prescription eyeglasses are, by definition, made to order for your particular ocular correction needs – i.e., if you are 20:70 with a slight astigmatism in one eye, you need something “ground” (or otherwise fabricated) to the particular specific correction that eye needs to see perfectly. Other costs can include auto-polarizatin (“photogrey” or “photobrown”), lineless bifocals, lens shape to fit your referred frame, the actual cost of the frame, etc. Plus normally adjustments and repairs are included in the price – sort of a built-in “free” warranty, and TANSTAAFL.
At that, though, $300 seems extreme. What I needed seven years ago was rather extreme, and cost less than $200.
Reading glasses are, by comparison, cheap. My hunch is that Qazzz’s note of a special offer is (a) introductory; we wanna sell you more than the basics; and (b) a basic no-frills “you get what we feel like giving you for that price” offer.
While you may not have eye insurance, many people do through their work. When I go to buy a new pair of glasses it usually costs me $50 to $100 out of pocket since I do have insurance. The fact that the insurance company picks up the rest is something I don’t worry too much about so the whole experience doesn’t seem that expensive to me. If I had to pay 100% of the cost I would be complaining as much as you.
Never looked at them and it seems the nearest store of theirs to me is 86 miles away (I live in Chicago so hardly the boondocks).
My costs were as follows:
$50 Eye Exam (10 minutes if that to finish)
$120 Frames (designer were $250 and up) 120 Lenses (with extra charges for anti-scratch, UV protection and whatnot)
??? Tax whatever that was
The store did have a special of two pair for $99 but you have almost no choice in frames. They give you the basic black, cat eye frames and that is that. I am not a terribly vain person and I did look at those but trust me they were absolutely awful for me (really truly bad).
I appreciate these are made to order but in this day and age I am willing to bet a machine pops these out in a mass produced frenzy. Granted such a machine must be expensive but I still find it hard to think it is more than what is needed to manufacture televisions (as an example).
Unlike what some other posters have said, that’s about what I paid when I got glasses a couple of months ago, too. I saw the same prices you did. Sure, there were frames for $50 to $100, but they were really ugly. The decent looking ones started at $125, and they weren’t the designers. And I got various extras on my lenses which bumped up the cost there too.
Eyeglasses are cheap. I recently got the eye exam for $40 at Wally World. I then bought two pairs of memory titanium framed, scratch resistant glasses from Zenni Optical online for a total expenditure of under $200. If I’d gone with a cheaper material on frames and foregone the lens coating, I could have come in with a total expenditure under $100.
I bought new glasses lately. I happen to have my receipt right here:
Exam $68
Glaucoma Test $7
Frames $157
Lenses $189
AR coat $49
Total $470
Excluding the portion of that for the actual testing, the glasses were $395.
Why were mine so expensive? Well, the frames are Kenneth Cole, which were a little more than average. (most of them ran around $120) Does it cost that much to manufacture frames? No. But someone’s got to make them, and make lots of them so that you can find ones that look good on you. And since the average consumer only buys glasses every two-three years, they’re not selling as many pairs of frames as, say, pairs of shoes.
Why were my lenses so expensive? They are 1.67 refractive index, which is a special lens material engineered to give the very best optical performance while being extremely thin and meeting strict requirements for impact resistance. It’s not “just plastic.” It’s difficult to find plastics that are hard enough for lenses that have good optical properties. You can’t use the same PETE that your 2L Pepsi bottle is made of. I’ve got a strong prescription, and less expensive lens materials are thick. Very thick, very heavy. And they distort colors such that I get color fringes while reading black on white text.
And the AR coat? This is a vacuum deposited thin metal (I believe) layer that reduces glare that bounces off my lenses. I tried it one year and liked it, but I find it makes the lenses smudge easily. I tried going without it on my last pair and quickly found that I can no longer stand not to have it.
Does a machine pop out lenses in a mass fury? Well, sort of. It pops out lens blanks. They still have to be ground to your personal prescription and cut to fit perfectly in the frames of your choice. They still have to pay for the monomers to make the lens blanks. They have to pay someone to coat them with coatings (AR, anti-scratch, photochromic, etc) of your choice. Those coatings aren’t free. (in the interest of disclosure, I make my living working with some of those coatings, and have great familiarity with the optical monomers research as well)
Eye glasses are a custom made medical accessory that you wear every day. If you’re half blind like me, you spend all your waking hours looking through the things. It’s worth dropping a little cash on them. There’s more science behind them than the $10 pair of sunglasses you picked up at the gas station.
I used to make eyeglasses in a lab. Granted, that was in the 1970’s, so all prices in my head should be adjusted for inflation, but technology should also be taken into account which might reduce the costs.
We made lenses for optometrists. We billed out $5 for each pair, inserted in the frames. Frames were supplied by the other side of the lab, the wholesaler. Most plastic frames wholesaled at $2 or less, the most expensive, designer, gold-filled metal ones, $6.
We purchased lens blanks for $.30/pair. The prescription (curve) was already in the blank, which was about 3 inches in diameter. It was placed on an automatic machine that cut the circumference of the blank to match the frame shape. This took about 90 seconds per lens.
These prices were only for not-too-thick lenses (<4 diopter), no coatings, single vision only (no bifocals). So anything the optometrist sold them for above $7 per set was pure profit, especially since the eye exam was extra. Until the discount eye places became common, that was often $100 each, even in those days.
Astigmatism correction is merely a cylindrical curve superimposed on a spherical one – no big deal for the lab. We stocked the most common sizes, and unless it was a real oddball curve, it still only cost us $.30 per pair.
20:70 vision isn’t a severe prescription, even with a minor astigmatism correction. It’s not a special order.
That sounds like a complicated process, but unless things have gotten more difficult in 30 years, the lab doesn’t grind lenses (they’re pre-ground to standard diopters and stocked in a cabinet) and cutting to fit the frames involves 90 seconds with a cam-driven diamond cutter and a template. It was simple and quick then; I suspect things are faster and cheaper now.
Plastic frames have a lot of give. In a heated salt box, you soften them, then pop the lenses inside. Shrink to fit by cooling and you’re done. Metal frames are less forgiving, but getting the machine to cut the size right is just a matter of setting the dial(s) to the right numbers(s).
It depends on your perscription. My last pair of glasses was $370. (This does not include the exam which was another $100 plus.) The glasses also had to be remade because the first pair wasn’t exact enough. I have an astigmatism which requires that the axis be pinpointed exactly in the lenses, if it isn’t placed correctly, everything is distorted. I also have an anti-reflective coating. This was at For Eyes which offers 2 pair for $99. The caveat is that not everyone is eligible for those promotions; it depends on your perscription.
I think much of the cost is similar to jewelry prices. Vendors pitch eyeglasses as fashion accessories rather than optical aids. All the television commercial advertisements I see for glasses show fashion models wearing them, and almost none of the advertisements refer to anything about visual acuity. Jewelry and designer clothes are notorious for being poor values by any measure other than fashion, art, and decoration.
Just $300?? that is cheap. I paid $600 for my last 2 pairs. Progressive no-line bifocals, high index strong prescription, polycarbonate lenses, anti-reflective coating, Transition darkening in the sun lenses. The frames were half-off, around $100 IIRC.
Maybe I need to shop around more, but I am cross-eyed and farsighted with astigmatism.
I think there are two factors at work here. All the add-ons; both the nice-to-have: lighter, non-scratch & non-glare lenses and the necessary: strong prescription. The relatively small extras all add up.
The other is it is hard to truly do any comparison shopping until you have the eye exam and lenses & frame fitting completed.
I forgot about the stock prescriptions, but from what I’ve heard from our marketing people, not much has changed in the cutting and fitting from when you worked in the industry. (I’m *much * further back in the supply chain - I bet there’s someone here that currently works in a lab).
I think glasses are an interesting mix of fashion and its crazy economics, and technology. I don’t mind paying for technology (especially when it pays my mortgage), and I’m a slave to fashion (I love my newest frames, and that’s saying a lot because I hate glasses).
I’ve been going without glasses for months because I can’t afford a good pair. I’m starting to reconsider my standards of fashion as, as I type this, my eyes seem to be moving in different directions trying to focus on the type. The lack of focus and headaches are akin to being drunk and hungover at the same time.
Here’s an example of why markup (driven by customer expectations like fashion, etc.) is a factor. No longer having access to a lab, I took an old frame to two local, non-franchise eyewear outlets and asked for the cost to make 2 lenses, <3 diopter sphere, single vision, to fit in the supplied metal frame. No coating, #2 gray color. One quote was $54, the other, $118. That’s a lot of difference in cost for no difference in product.
I had to have one lens in a pair of glasses (less than 1 year old) changed. I took the glasses back to the place where I originally purchased them (it was that place that baits you with talk about 1 hour service, you know where I mean). They quoted me a price of $310 to change out the lenses. They said they couldn’t do just one.
I get my glasses from a licensed optician who has set up shop in his basement. He buys last year’s frames to resell, and cuts the lenses himself. My last pair, bought in August 2006, cost me $85, plus $5 shipping so that I didn’t have to go back to his house. I have a very strong prescription, and need to get the lighter, thinner plastic, but did not otherwise get any special doodads (I don’t know if he even offers them.) My husband recently bought the fanciest, most expensive designer frames in the place, and paid $250. I grant that the guy probably has lower operating costs (it’s a one-man operation which he opens as it’s convenient for him, so you have to call and check, and he obviously doesn’t pay rent), but my glasses still cost 1/4 what my mom recently paid for similar glasses elsewhere, and I’ve been very happy with them. I think the markup on these things is obscene.