I just can’t help throwing in the story about how to price glasses, given to me by an optometrist. When the customer says, “How much will this be?”, you say:
“That’ll be $100.”
If the customer doesn’t blink, you say, “For the frames, and $50 for the lenses.”
If the customer still doesn’t blink or recoil, you say, “Each.”
That’s nonsense. All lenses are made one at a time. They just wanted more money.
So where/how do you price glasses?
I did look around and ultimately went to ForEyes since they were conveniently located and my online research didn’t find a notable price difference between them and other merchants.
I do however need to go try on frames. Some people seem able to wear near any frame and look fine. I’m the reverse and need to try on 50 different frames to find one that is passable. Online purchasing is not really an option (even if I see frames I like in a store I am unsure how I would find the same frames online).
I have no problem paying merchants a fair price so they make a profit but as noted above the pricing scheme seems frankly obscene. I am fine if they sell designer frames for $500 and if that is your thing fine but I would like to see some reasonably priced frames I can go for as well.
Given that most merchants seems to be on the same page pricing wise and given the seemingly HUGE cost variance (how do they sell 2 frames with lenses for $99 but mine somehow cost $300 for one?) it almost smacks of price fixing. No proof of course but feels like it else they’d price war each other down to more humane prices.
Unless they were tinted. It’s next to impossible to get one lens tinted to match another.
My father got a pair of glasses with light grey tint at WalMart once. There was a defect in one of the lenses, so they had just that lens replaced. It very obviously did not match the tint in the other lens, but it didn’t bother him so he kept them. It bugged me to look at, though. I wouldn’t have kept them.
Still, $310 for just lenses (assuming plain vanilla single visions) sounds obscene to me.
Actually, I believe plastic is more difficult to grind and polish. If it’s mass-produced like a camera lens then it can be molded, but eyeglass lenses come in thousands of different shapes, maybe tens of thousands if you include bifocals and trifocals. I’m pretty sure they need to be individually ground and polished.
You can still get glass lenses too, by the way. They are cheaper than plastic, but also heavier. Until recently glass lenses were thinner (for the same power) because glass has a higher index of refraction, but modern high-index plastic lenses are getting pretty close.
I think frames have improved significantly over the past decade or two. My current pair is made of some type of titanium-based shape-memory alloy. It’s not just hype, it’s the lightest and most comfortable pair I’ve had, and durable too.
Quite frankly glasses are a big rip off, and yet something you cannot do without.
Go over to places like Hong Kong, Singapore, Korea and around that area of the Pacific rim and you’ll see what I mean, I’m sure other Dopers have been around that part of the workd and can verify what I’m saying.
Opticians will tell you all about individual consultations, customisation, personal prescriptions and long lead times. They will tell you about how they have the expertise to spot medical conditions before you even know you have them yourself.
Most of it is simply bollox, they are bigging themselves up.
As I say, go into a optician store in the aforementioned countries, what you’ll find is a box that resembles an old video game console, similar looking to say Space invaders.
The machine runs the tests, all you do is look at a screen and press a button when prompted, and the optician guides you through the process.
Optician then looks into your eyes.
Les than half an hour later, and somewhat sooner if the work is near to stock lenses, you have your spectacles, for a fraction of some of the prices quoted here, less than $50, and thats giving you a good variety of frames to choose from.
Go for more ordinary glasses and you can pay a lot less, even when you add coatings, tints special lenses, you are nowhere near the prices quted here.
In the UK the opticians market was freed up, its still has quite a lot of regulation, but in the weeks following partial deregulation, prices dropped markedly, the virtual monopoly was broken.
The charge what the market will stand, there must be a pretty good living to be made for someone who will supply spectacles to a prescription and import from places like Japan etc and bypasses the usual optician bullshit.
When you start going for the designer stuff, the money you could save from going abroad would probably pay a substantial percentage to taking a holiday there.
Reading the responses above sounds like most glasses lenses are pre-made and stocked. The appropriate blank for your vision is taken out and cut to fit using a template by a machine. Popped in the frame then shipped off.
Doubtless there are custom orders but I expect you pay even more for that. Most people it sounds like can be covered by some number of standard prescriptions allowing for mass production (and the attendant economies of scale associated with that).
Having a good optometrist who isn’t out to scam you for every cent you’ve got helps too. I had my eyes checked last month and for the first time since I’ve worn glasses (16+ years?) I heard that my prescription hasn’t changed that much and I probably shouldn’t bother to get new glasses, unless I wanted to.
He also metioned that if my vision stays stable I could be a candidate for lasik. Which would actually cause me to spend even less money at his office. He told me about his experiance with the surgery, and said if I was interested he could recommend a few places. Great guy, my wife went to him originally and now my whole family goes to him.
True. And tints fade over time.
Probably a few hundred will handle 80% of cases. But those are sitting in a cabinet in the lab waiting to be pulled and shaped. The prescription is pre-made and filed in the drawer. 3" diameter blanks are pretty compact for storage.
In my lab, the entire blank inventory was in a file cabinet no bigger than a typical 4-drawer office filing cabinet in terms of cubic space. Once a day we would order the more exotic blanks and replenish common items from the manufacturer’s rep down the street, and his inventory wasn’t much bigger, fitting in small office suite. It was rare that one of us didn’t have exactly the right, readymade blank.
One reason why more weren’t required is that optometrists prescribe by quarter-diopter resolution, even though most refraction equipment registers down to 1/8 diopter. Most people aren’t that discriminating, so the optician rounds off. Cuts down on the amount of stock needed by half. So between -3.75 diopter and +3.75, that makes only about 26 sizes (people who need only .25 or .5 diopters probably won’t bother with glasses). Impose -.5, -.25, +.25, +.5 cyl on each, you only have another 100 sizes or so, and that covers the majority of people we encountered.
My glasses - may 2006 (O.D -6sph OS -5.5sph -.50cyl 174axis*)
From eyemart express:
frames - not the cheapest they had - metal with hinge springs - $49.95
Polycarbonate SV lense 59.95
warrantee (scratch, some other stuff) - $20
no sales tax
total $129.90
Brian
*I’ve never had cyl (for astigamtism) in a prescription before, always been straight sphere.
A couple of things to be careful of. One, do get an opthalmologist, NOT just an optician, to check your eyes, especially after about 35 or 40, at least once every couple of years. It is definitely possible to have conditions like glaucoma that you will never notice until it is too late and you are starting to go blind. (slight exaggeration) Two, a quality exam and fitting are more likely to get it right the first time. I got glasses from one of the chains for a while and they never seemed quite “right,” even after multiple adjustments. My husband gets his glasses at Sears, and brags about how much less he spends than I do. Of course he had to go back three or four times until they were right. Mine were right the first time. Three, $50 for an eye exam is cheap. It’s not the time, it’s knowing what to look for, and it should definitely take more than 10 minutes if they are doing it right. Finally, if you’re not satisfied that the eye doctor is doing a good job, don’t go back. Find another one.
ETA, I am not a doctor or optician. But I have been wearing glasses for about 50 years.
That’s a very thick (on the edge) “minus” lens, both eyes. It could be in the “extra cost” category for some labs – the break point is typically -4.00.
A .25 cyl is the least amount prescribed. If you had refracted less (like .125), it probably would have been set to zero. .50 cyl is nothing to worry about, and the advantage of that small an astigmatism correction is the lab doesn’t have to be too accurate about setting the axis!
It’s interesting to note that there are two ways of writing the numbers for your left eye (OS) due to the compound curve. It could have been written -6.00sph, +.50cyl[sup]*[/sup] and it would have been the same refraction value. Looking at it that way, both of your eyes have the same amount of nearsightedness, but the left has a minor cylindrical curvature as well.
[sup]*[/sup]It’s been so long since I had to do these conversions, I hope I have that formula right. It’s simple once you know how and we used to get prescriptions either way.
Well, my glasses are always expensive because I need bifocals with ultralight lenses (they’d be much too thick otherwise). So my lenses are often twice what I pay for frames, which I can usually get for under $100.
OTOH, my daughter, who has a simpler prescription, was able to get a second pair of glasses from BJ’s for $89 plus tax. That didn’t include the exam, which usually runs around $30.
At the same time, any lense that’s considered “good looking” nowadays is apt to be expensive. They have to be exceptionally sturdy and light and precision made to match lense to frame. If you want plastic lenses like people wore in the 50s, or which you find on cheap sunglasses today, you could get them cheaper, but most people don’t.
For the last year or two, I’ve needed bifocal reading glasses, and after getting the first set for $150 from my eye doctor (subsidized by insurance), and finding out that glasses stores in my local mall wanted $200 to $300 for the same, I went online. (Cheapskate that I am!)
I, too, can recommend Zenni Optical, mentioned above by ScumPup. For between $30 and $60 shipped, you can get decent prescription glasses in about three weeks.
Like RealityChuck, my prescription is pretty weird. I have a serious discrepancy between left and right, so I need specialty lenses that are lightweight and thin, otherwise I get nauseous. In fact, my lenses are apparently such a specialty item that I’ve only found one store that will even attempt it. I also tend to have UV coating prescribed because I’ve got blue eyes and I hate wearing sunglasses, so my optometrist and I have an understanding about that.
That said, I find specials for that particular store that allow me to buy two pairs for roughly the price of one. And because I know the lenses will be expensive, I tend to go cheap on the frames. Since the lenses are fairly thin, I don’t have to worry about finding frames that will fit the lenses.
Robin
I didn’t respond earlier, because the right answer was given so early, and by people who actually worked in this area. I just wanted to point out that occasionally some special situations do require more expensive optical aids. I knew an old guy who used to sit in a two-room lab in downtown Boston grinding custom contact lenses for oddly-shaped corneas by hand. And one place I worked was still grinding and polishing glass bifocals until the end of 2005, when they finally shut the factory down after a century of constant use. Nowadays most lenses areplastic, and manufactured by ruthlessly complete automation, and often outside the US.
Heh. My last pair of glasses was $20. $10 copay for the exam, $10 for the lenses/frames (up to $120–after that, I would’ve gotten a substantial discount). Of course, I lucked out in that my job at the time had vision coverage.
Of course, I know there has to be some customization in there that has to do with astigmatism. Everyone else I’ve known gets a quoted turnaround time of 3-5 days with my optometrist. I get 7-10. When I asked about it, the receptionist explained that my astigmatism was of such a nature that most places didn’t have anything pre-done for it. So. . .yay for being special. I guess.
I have the same issue, with strong astigmatism. My prescription:
-3.50 -2.50 x 45
-3.50 -2.75 x 130
As a kid, I was always disappointed we would go the one-hour eye places for glasses, and mine wouldn’t be ready for a week or two.
I whole heartedly support Wal-Mart’s optometry shack. I get $13 frames and $30 lenses.
Actually, I can’t remember all the prices exactly, but my last visit was around $100 for the exam, glasses and a box of contacts.
Remember that your price (though not their cost, really) jumps a lot if you want a drill-mount (rimless) frame.
Plus, you’ll probably break them in about half the time.
One sneaky trick to lower your costs: buy some inexpensive sunglasses that fit your face well and have some heft to them. (i.e. looks like eyeglass frames, with nose pads, frame screws, etc.) They can cost as little as $5. Take in this frame and ask them to replace the lenses. Congrats, you’ve just saved yourself the cost of the designer frame, which is a huge markup.