Grumping at the optician's

[abendgules]

Last week I went to the opticians - I'd noticed I was stuggling to focus at the MoL and NPG when we've been to exhibits recently, bouncing back and forth between looking through my glasses and peering under them.

I tried a different branch of the opticians this time, b/c the local one was so crap - poor service, clumsy efforts at upselling me at every opportunity.

The verdict: I have a small change in my Rx, and perhaps I'd like to try varifocals.

I waffled, went back to reprice them...and balked. Nearly £320 for two pairs of glasses, or £250 for a single pair, with varifocal lenses and a moderately priced frame.

The 2-for-1 upsell pricing irritates me; for 'only' another £70 you can get a second pair! which suggests that the first pair is not worth £250, but closer to £70...or possibly nowhere near either price, who knows? There's no easy way to see the markup on lenses and frames.

There are certainly specialist materials and skills involved in grinding lenses, but I suspect the process is now all done mechanically - if, as the pricing suggests, it's just as easy to get 2 pairs done at once as one pair, then they're not being ground by hand.

The frames are certainly not created by hand, except perhaps in assembly and fitting.

I cannot see what separates the expensive frame from the cheap ones, other than ugliness, and designer names. Only in a few cases there are extra features like hinges to prevent you from snapping the arms, or special materials like titanium. You can get expensive plastic frames as easily as cheap ones, and just as ugly.

So - buggerem. I walked out. I don't need the Rx change; my close vision is fine, though I had hoped that there would be an option to improve it; my current glasses aren't broken.

Buggerem.

Next step: better lighting for winter crafting and scribing.

Comments

[aryanhwy.livejournal.com]

If you do end up switching to varifocals, you'll probably never go back. I love mine (have had them since I was 14).

I don't know what goes into the pricing schemes you mention, though, since I've never been in a position to have been offered them. A complete set of glasses -- frames, lenses, and optometrist's visit -- generally costs me about $1000, which is why I only get new frames when I absolutely have to. Because of my prescription, there are certain types of frames (usually the cheaper ones) that I can't use because they aren't sturdy enough for my lenses, which means that w/o getting a new frame, a new prescription (including optometrist's visit, which is usually a minor fraction) generally only costs me about $750.

[graydon saunders (from livejournal.com)]

http://www.clearlycontacts.ca/
are apparently the same corporation as

http://www.lensway.co.uk/

So it might be worth a look. It certainly sounds like your local opticians desperately deserve some dis-inter-mediation.

I get contact lens from the Canadian version. (They don't carry frames in my size. I still get glasses lenses (current memory-alloy frames will likely outlast me) from my optometrist.)

You do need to know the prescription.

[kirieldp.livejournal.com]

I had laser surgery and it at least fixed my short-sightedness. Ok at some stage I will need reading glasses, but at least then it will only be one pair, and they can be bought from the chemist.

If you add up the price of a few future pairs of glasses, laser surgery actually is not that expensive, and the only regret I have is that I didn't do it years earlier.

[wareham-v.livejournal.com]

Maybe check the availability of some of the online glasses suppliers. I've bought glasses twice from ClearlyContacts out of Vancouver. It's never as cheap for progressives, which may be what we Canucks call your 'varifocals', and my first pair wasn't as good as my second, which I think had to do with a different shape of lense. But they weren't bad, and at a savings of several hundred dollars! I'm currently musing over offerings at Zenni Optical, another online supplier. I figure if I can find a good enough price, then it's worth the risk...
v/m

[idaho-smith.livejournal.com]

I've had some luck with the cheap range here:

http://www.selectspecs.com/

[milites.livejournal.com]

I recently got reading glasses, but the bulk pricing deal seems to be because if you have astigmatism, setting up the machine to do two lenses is no more trouble than doing one, so there are significant fixed costs and lower marginal costs. I expect that if you bought them 4 at a time there'd be even more opportunity for lowering the unit cost.

It does make some sense.