I worked on the retail IT side of things at Luxottica.
I don't even think that you've scratched the surface of just how prevalent Luxottica is: you've touched the retail side of things, but, you also haven't touched the manufacturing side of things (Lux has patents on the hinges used in glasses), the wholesaling side of things (Lux supplies generic and branded frames to your local optician on less-than-preferred terms), and then just the genetic beast that is their optimization efforts.
I discovered some ineffective linux and db management that was adding 15-30 minutes of closing time every night -- time where we'd have employees on the clock waiting to close the store -- and figured out why it was behaving the way that it was and fixed it so the 'point of sales' part of closing wouldn't be the hold up. Saved the company almost 13 million dollars a year in labor costs and 45 million in licensing costs when I came up with a way to replace the POS systems OS without needing a cross-ship of new hardware...and still got screwed around when it came to my hourly rate increased or getting my contract renewed...
When my girlfriend's son passed away from complications with cancer, I had flowers and cards sent from some former coworkers, but, not a single person even reached out to me until a few months later, where they asked me if I was 'ready to go back to work' after cutting my contract.
It was well known that if someone robbed a Sunglass hut, the most expensive item in the store to replace was the iPad...
I've had very good luck ordering from Zenni and Coastal. It is perhaps a bit harder to find a frame style you like, but once you have a frame of reference for say width measurements it's not so bad.
They're especially good for cheap prescription sun glasses. I bought a whole stack of them years ago I'm still working through. If I go to the river or where ever and something happens to them I'm out $25 instead of $250.
It also helped that the last time I went to a local shop it proved to be a ridiculous experience. I ordered a pair of clear acrylic frames, and for whatever reason when they came in the sales clerk got bored and thought it'd be interesting to use highlighter on the insides of the frame to see what it looked like. But then it wouldn't come off so she just kinda tried to play it off like nothing happened when I picked them up. It was completely absurd. I had to wait another month for them to reorder.
So yeah, eyeglasses are now one of those categories of local businesses where I've learned they're basically all scams.
Related: it's getting hard to find a cleaner that does alterations in house vs mailing them off to a service. Last couple times I've had to do that it turns into a 4 to 6 week long game of "where did your clothing disappear to and will the store find it this time or tell you to come back in a week yet again."
Why is it so many of these simple services increasingly feel like total scams in the US?
> Why is it so many of these simple services increasingly feel like total scams in the US?
Because 'quiet franchising' is a huge money maker for those selling the franchises.
For alterations you need to look for someone who does full custom clothing in-house; cleaning services almost all now ship even the cleaning to some central location.
I was able to find an actual cobbler nearby; they're still out there but it can be hard to find.
Yeah, the guy in my neighborhood is a full tailor, which is why I was surprised he sent my jeans out. Guy has a bit of an ego too cuz he used to do Johny Carson's suits back in the day or something. But anyhow, getting some jeans taken up shouldn't turn into a 6 week adventure.
Eyebuydirect is a Luxottica subsidiary. Coastal became Clearly became a Luxottica subsidiary. I think Zenni is independent for now (couldn't find any evidence to the contrary).
> I don't think that I'd ever pay more than $100 for a frame again.
$100 sounds like it's ~10x what the price should actually be for simple plastic shapes, and it's probably more than 100x the actual cost to manufacture them.
I assume that's $100 including the lenses—seems like a reasonable price for something that requires custom high-precision manufacturing, although it would be great for the price to come down even further over time.
I have a moderately strong prescription (with slight differences for each eye) and I got the best glasses I've ever had from Zenni for $72.90 + tax. Could have been $60 without a presumably overpriced anti-reflective coating. I don't remember how much my glasses cost from traditional sources, but I think it was on the order of $200–$300 after insurance.
Lenses are no longer custom high precision manufacturing... In fact a 50 cent laser pointer has far more far more precise lenses than a pair of glasses.
Lenses today tend to be polycarbonate plastic anyway - which means they can be produced rapidly like any other plastic moulding.
For a lot of people you can just take lenses from the production line and cut them to shape and be done but that is not always the case. Personally I always have to wait 2 to 3 weeks to get new glasses done as the lenses have to be made to spec and the lenses alone are around 350€ and no they are not any cheaper at any online retailer that operates here if they even offer to make lenses to my spec.
Methods for cheap fully custom made lenses are also coming to fruition.
Both SLA and FDM 3D printers are now able to make curved surfaces with 10's of micrometer precision across the lens surface, and local 10's of nanometer smoothness (usually via a surface-tension based smoothing process).
Usually you then use that as part of a two part mould to make the lens out of polycarbonate or some resin which has optical and hardness properties you want.
The whole lot, if done in ~10M quantities should come out to only 10 cents or so per piece (with each piece having a custom geometry).
There are really big opportunities available for doing this to contact lenses, since the lens can then fully compensate for any unevenness in the eye below, and could possibly lead to superhuman vision if done right. The same can't be done for glasses since the eyeball moves - instead the best you can do is a best-fit approximation for looking ahead.
Then you are an incredible outlier. The vast majority of folks that need glasses do not have this as the reason for the lenses being expensive. They're just being shafted.
Which country and what is special about your eyes or glasses?
I have noticed that in France glasses with decent but standard frames cost around 5 times as much as in the UK. My suspicion is that the difference is related to how supplementary health insurance works in France rather than any special manufacturing requirements.
Frames you can find for cheap if you look around a bit. The lenses cost a lot as I need massive amounts of prism (took me a bit of looking around to find an optometrist/eye doctor with equipment that could even measure it as it is outside of the range of normal measuring machines) on both to ensure that my eyes focus on the same point
The amount of prism is now to the point that adding more is not really possible and thus if it gets worse next step is surgery on the muscles controlling the eyes or intentionally letting one eye look away. Over time the brain starts to ignore the other eye for focused vision (it would still get used for peripheral vision)
But yeah without the prism the lenses are like 30€. Once you add prisms the lenses are around 350€.
I'm not the OP but I just got new glasses and they were ~$500. The frames were about $180 (one of the cheaper sets in the store and about $60 more than I paid 2 years ago; yay inflation). So the lens were around $300 and took 2 weeks to produce.
I have a severe case of Strabismus (Exotropia) and my left lens requires a prism in order to keep my eyes focused on the same target. The required prism has gotten strong over the years and as it has, the price of the prism has gone up as well. The prism alone added nearly $200 to my lens cost this time around.
All that said, I imagine the lack of competition (the thread topic) is at least partly to blame for this. I highly doubt my glasses cost anywhere near that much, even if they are special.
i work at Luxottica in a subsidiary that sells finished lenses to opticians or semifinished lenses to labs, cheap plastic lenses go for 0.15€/pcs, the expensive lenses range between 10-15€ each
You don't pay $100 on Zenni for simple glasses. I bought a pair of glasses there with metal frame, anti-glare and anti-fog coating for under $20 with shipping.
Indeed. I buy 5 pairs of glasses at a time (cheapest ones I can manage which look OK). 5 at a time is still cheaper than 1/3rd the price of low cost normal glasses.
And each of those 5 pairs is half as durable.
It is a similarly wild situation where eye exams at Walmart can be cheaper than at a regular eye doctor covered by my insurance.
Something I have noticed with eye "insurance"--mostly they pay $X for particular things but when you look at what's available it's something like $X *above* what we pay at Costco. In one case I was even able to confirm that the "insurance" isn't actually paying anything.
And the only time I've paid over $100 for frames is when I order the ones with a magnetic polarized clip-on that are hard to find. (And I wish I could find something like my old ones where the magnets were on top instead of on the bottom. It was more secure.)
I bought my lone pair of glasses in 2009 and I've replaced the lenses once since then. I wear them every day. Now I'm wondering what everyone else is doing.
Mine generally last a two years or so, before they are scratched and fogged to the point that my vision is affected. The big culprit is dust - often metal dust, but also hardwood dust - in the shop. Even if you religiously use a non-scratching, micro-fiber wipe (which is hard), just dragging the stuff across the lenses damages them. Another culprit is glue, particularly CA (super) glue but also other types. You may not think it would end up on your glasses, but if you're using much of it, eventually microdroplets end up on your lenses. This does immediate, permanent damage to polycarbonate lenses.
My desk glasses, optimized for computer screen distance and never actually leaving my office, on the other hand - easily last a decade with no discernable damage. Because - no significant dust, no organic vapors, no glue, and always wiped with a clean micro-fiber wipe.
For me it’s always been chlorine and other cleaning products. Salt water and sweat doesn’t help either.
Forget to take the glasses off before you jump into the pool or readjust your glasses while cleaning the house and before you know it the coating starts to dissolve. Even if you’re religiously rinsing them, the accumulated damage to the coatings fogs up the lenses and weakens the surface against scratches.
That removes way less than all of the abrasive dust, and to some extent just turns what remains in to an abrasive slurry. You still get abrasion of the coating over time. And water doesn't help at all with damage due to solvents, glue, and the like.
Some of us have eyes that don't permit that. From the point I started needed glasses I have only once gone a year on the pair I use for the computer--nothing wrong with the glass, it's just my eyes drift enough that they start giving me headaches. I usually get 2-3 years out of my progressives before they're too far off and need replacement. With an adaptable lens my brain simply automatically compensates as my eyes change, I only need replacement when the infinity goes wrong or as my astigmatism changes too much.
For me I've got regular driving glasses, safety glasses, computer glasses (you don't want to use your full prescription for close distance), and sun glasses.
Unless state law says otherwise the optician is an independent business. Check your local laws, some states don't allow that arrangement.
I'm not sure what the business deal is, but it looks to me like the rent the space from walmart and wal-mart does the scheduling. That is the person who does the exam isn't a WalMart employee, but they use WalMart for services. If you watch close you will notice they use a different POS system for paying for your exam from the one you use to buy your glasses.
Independent doesn't mean that there isn't a profit to Walmart in having it there. I go to one of those Walmart eye docs--she's independent of the store and has her own office staff, but her office has a second door that opens into Walmart's optical center.
Zenni is a good choice _if you know your PD_ (pupillary distance) - the distance from nose to center of pupil. 1 mm off will turn your glasses into headache machines.
And the phone apps that purport to measure this are universally bad. Get it professionally done at a place that will give you the value. Costco will do so.
If you don't want to purchase online Costco is decent price - $180ish for the progressives lenses I just purchased vs $400+ from LensCrafters.
Downside of Costco is a limited selection of frames, but worth a look.
Also heard good things about Warby Parker but have not purchased lenses from them.
Oh, Zenni's progressive lenses have a much narrower distance vision section in the lens than Costco's. So I get progressive glasses at Costco then single reading and computer glasses (for < $40 each) at Zenni.
How does buying glasses online even work? I have never tried, so I'd expect it to be like buying shoes without trying them on (which I won't do either, based on in-store experience I'd be returning 9 pairs out of 10 for bad fit).
I wear glasses for 95% of time, I want to not hate how they feel.
Yes. Like a charm. Biggest potential hitch is that your optometrist will give you your prescription (they are required by law), but won't include your ocular measurements, which you then have to make yourself at home in order to order the glasses. Get the inter-ocular distance wrong, in particular, and your glasses will not work correctly.
Hint, when buy glasses ask about swim goggles - they will write down the PD distance (since they don't have swim goggles), and then you can keep that number. You still need to buy one final set of glasses, but you can get their cheap frames and be done.
This life hack really isn't necessary, you can just ask for your PD distance and they'll bring out a little machine that measures it. No optometrist has ever been weird about it, a few have even told me a few sites to get cheaper glasses.
My optometrist was weird about it, presumably because he also sells frames and lenses. I went to an optometrist who doesn't sell frames or lenses and she was happy to spend less than a minute to measure my PD. I won't be going back to the former.
I go to Walmart Vision. They do all the measurements and write down everything without complaining at all for (I think) about $70. Then order a few pair from Zenni and restock every 5-7 years.
US scripts usually don't include the ocular measurements. I've had a pair where they got the vertical ever so slightly wrong on a progressive, truly horrible, I went back to the eye doc about it and it confounded him also--I could look through the script on his machine and it was fine. He finally figured out what had happened, dialed something into his machine and it was just as awful as the glasses. The optician recut the offending lens, no problem at all. I have no idea how you are even supposed to measure that at home, the opticians always seem to do it on the frame you're actually going to be using. It's not fixed like PD is. (If you're not doing progressive it doesn't have to be spot on, though.)
Measuring Pupillary Distance (PD, or distance between your pupils) is easy! Here's how:
1) Stand in front of a vertical mirror, making sure you are square to the mirror.
2) Place a horizontal ruler on the surface of the mirror.
3) Close one eye and move your head until the reflection of the centre of your pupil lines up with zero on the ruler.
4) Keeping your head still, open your eye and close the other eye.
5) The Pupillary Distance is the reading on the ruler that lines up with the centre of the reflection of your pupil.
6) If you want to double check it, just swap the opening of your eyes and check that the other eye still sees itself at zero.
I use this method whenever I order glasses online and have yet to have a pair of glasses that have any error in the manufacturing. I now only buy glasses online.
Not every opto is always willing to give you your PD. Some like to beat around the bush because they'd rather try to nudge you into buying in store instead.
a) The method works because placing the ruler on the surface of the mirror guarantees that it is parallel to the mirror. The source and destination of the light ray is your pupil, so the ray is guranteed to be perpendicular to the mirror and the ruler.
b) The plane of your pupils needs to be parallel to the mirror/ruler. This is easy to judge as your eyes will be relaxed and looking straight ahead at your own reflection in the mirror. If your eyes are looking left or right you need to turn your head so you are looking straight ahead. People are generally pretty good at judging "straight ahead", so chances are that you are doing this correctly.
Satisfying the above two constraints means the geometry gives an accurate measurement, probably more accurate than an optometrist can judge by holding a ruler up to your eyes and trying to guesstimate that they have no parallax error.
My friend has purchased several pairs from Zenni but the frames kept cracking around the lens even though she only wears them for a couple of hours each day. They'd send her a new frame and it would do the same after a month or two. She didnt really like the metal frames they offered so kept choosing plastic frames. Finally she got fed up with Zenni and purchased slightly more expensive glasses from Warby Parker and has had zero issues since. It definitely feels like a "you get what you paid for" type of story here. Zenni is much cheaper than buying frames from Luxottica but there's definitely some happy medium where you aren't overpaying for glasses but still buying something of comparable quality to the overpriced brands. She used to get Ray-Ban frames while on her parent's insurance but when she got her own, she could get a free years supply of contacts or Luxottica-priced pair of glasses. So now she gets her big supply of contacts from a retailer using insurance and buys a new pair of Warby Parker glasses using HSA money.
For Europe, Ace & Tate [1] are affordable and pretty good quality. Frame + lens go for €110, or €120 to include blue light filter coating.
Frankly, unless we're talking about real designer pieces, glasses have been a completely utilitarian/commodity item for the past half century. The real achievement of Luxottica (which also reflects in their brand name) is that they still manage to sell them as premium/craft products.
A few years back my wife bought a pair (single vision) in China for about $30--excellent at the time but they turned out not to be durable. (She had taken a tumble and smashed her pair.)
I paid $11 (shipped) for a pair of glasses from them for use in VR. I didn’t want to screw up my normal glasses. For eleven bucks they aren’t bad at all. Not my style. And I didn’t get any coating so the reflections are bad but man, I can’t see for shit without glasses and I’m happy that if I even fall on hard times I can at least pay for a new pair of glasses.
I definitely think it's cool that they have some pretty freaking cheap frames. That said, I didn't pay more than $100 for my frame.
They didn't have that many $100+ glasses at the store. I think the frames that I bought for like $60 (didn't even hit the max, so they were free). Honestly, think they're nicer than most of the frames there.
You can buy oakleys for like $40-70. Even the sale ones tend to look better than the ones on zenni. Some of the nicer zenni's are $40+ anyway.
Of course it is really cool to see decent frames for $20 or less. I'm going to keep it in mind in the future.
Zenni is a Chinese company that wouldn’t ship to Lithuania presumably because of Taiwan situation. I’ve got new sunnies from them just few days ago, but still super wary. There must be better.
My fiance did store tech support, and holy SHIT I cannot believe that place manages to function day to day. There was some weird system that support staff had to RDP into, but the server was set to Spanish. Instead of, I dunno, fixing the language, all the support staff were given a document with translations of everything they need to use.
There was another HR system that support staff again had to RDP into to change passwords or personnel details or something. But it was so horribly misconfigured that there was a delay of minutes between keypress on the staff's client and response from the server. This task routinely took half an hour to update a few text fields.
Also yeah, they totally fucked him on hours and pay. The real big problem was the constant verbal harassment from store employees who are angry about systemic IT issues that have gone unresolved for years. One store has their internet drop out every single weekend. There's a ticket that's been open for years with hundreds of notes because the manager calls every weekend to report it.
Huh. That's interesting. I've wondered for over fifteen years why the parts of glasses appear to be so incredibly similar between brands, never really having stumbled across any quality stuff that's markedly different.
I don't even think that you've scratched the surface of just how prevalent Luxottica is: you've touched the retail side of things, but, you also haven't touched the manufacturing side of things (Lux has patents on the hinges used in glasses), the wholesaling side of things (Lux supplies generic and branded frames to your local optician on less-than-preferred terms), and then just the genetic beast that is their optimization efforts.
I discovered some ineffective linux and db management that was adding 15-30 minutes of closing time every night -- time where we'd have employees on the clock waiting to close the store -- and figured out why it was behaving the way that it was and fixed it so the 'point of sales' part of closing wouldn't be the hold up. Saved the company almost 13 million dollars a year in labor costs and 45 million in licensing costs when I came up with a way to replace the POS systems OS without needing a cross-ship of new hardware...and still got screwed around when it came to my hourly rate increased or getting my contract renewed...
When my girlfriend's son passed away from complications with cancer, I had flowers and cards sent from some former coworkers, but, not a single person even reached out to me until a few months later, where they asked me if I was 'ready to go back to work' after cutting my contract.
It was well known that if someone robbed a Sunglass hut, the most expensive item in the store to replace was the iPad...