161–170 of 317 posts
I'm a big fan of Jins ( https://www.jins.com/us/ ) in SF. They make your glasses on-site in ~30m. Price (lens + frame) is comparable to Warby Parker.
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Well, my first thought was - if eyewear can be produced for less, why doesn't somebody take advantage of the opportunity and do so? Capitalism at its finest and all that. But the answer immediately struck me: if somebody was offering a product at half the cost everybody else was, I wouldn't trust it - and I suspect most other people wouldn't, either. Considering the size of the initial investment, this upstart wouldn…
More importantly, when you have a giant company with a monopoly on something, they don't have to compete with you, they can instead just buy you up.
Nintendo did the same thing, minus the buyout, in the eighties when video game manufacturers tried to subvert Nintendo's control in that market.
You don't need a full fledged monopoly to upset market forces. Even the existence of a single large entity that can make unified decisions destroy a healthy market
It's articles like this that make me wonder how much of our middle class burden comes from hidden rent seeking parasites like this. I honestly don't know. I'm not trying to imply any particular thing. I honestly wonder. These sorts of things can stack up through the layers of companies that make things. And where does this money go? What does it end up doing?
Isn't this just as much another fashion trap? Many things from underwear, glasses, clothes to paper tissues are branded fashion items. None of these items are expensive to make, we just don't buy the cheapest.. probably you can find cheap glasses somewhere online, if not there's probably a business opportunity in that :) Question: do people want to buy cheap glasses, clothes, underwear? Or do they want to buy branded…
Absolutely, so long as they function. What do I care if the microprint logo on the frame is a recognizable brand? Especially if I'm buying frameless glasses where there just isn't much material work with for fashionable design. Just give me good lenses and a minimalist frame that won't fall apart. I don't want to pay $200 for $5.00 worth of titanium that people can barely even see on my face.
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Optimizing for just "better or worse" will result in excessively strong correction. If you're only looking at a single letter in the very center of your field of vision, then overcorrection feels sharper and easier to focus on. You don't notice the additional optical artifacts everywhere else. The ideal glasses have just barely enough correction. However, this isn't an argument against automation, because human optom…
I've just always found myself frustrated by the sense that beyond looking into my eyes for signs of disease, the actual act of making a prescription could be done by anyone with an afternoon of training; yet I have to make an appointment and drop 100-200$ for something that is, on occasion, less effort than getting an order correct at chipotle.
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It doesn't even seem like anyone has interest in building $200,000 houses anymore, but they will sell you a poorly made condo for $400,000 and $600/mo HOA fees. I am a single person trying to find a house that is not four or five bedrooms (I only need one or two) and doesn't cost 1/2 mil minimum and it's difficult. This used to be called "the starter house" but it doesn't seem to exist anymore with new construction.
The biggest cost in any metro area is land. There are few empty lots left to build on, and those go for a premium. Not going to give any specific listing publicity, but "$350,000 USD for 0.047 acres empty lot" is common in the residential parts of Atlanta. We recently paid $25M for 8 acres with abandoned warehouses on them, to build condos on. We're still looking at $100k land costs per condo. Go out two counties and…
Seems like the majority of optometrists could be replaced by photo booth-esque optometry machines. Simply sit in a booth, look through some eye ports, and the machine will automatically start cycling through lenses and making you choose between 1, 2, or equal. At the end it spits out your prescription for a nominal fee. For an extra fee you could have additional eye imagery taken by the machine sent off to a remote o…
There are already machines (called autorefractors) that can try to calculate your prescription. They operate on more complex principles than flipping lenses back and forth. They can provide a good starting point, but sometimes they aren't accurate.
A good optometrist can do a lot more than just give you your prescription, though. They should be checking your eyes for signs of disease, and treating things that they find. Seeing an optometrist for a checkup is preventative medicine, like regularly seeing a primary care physician or a dentist.
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> then you're no more or less getting "ripped off" You are being ripped off. Look at how much of the industry they own. The only reason this hasn't been acted on yet is because people see their various brands as being separate.
I don't even know what 'ripped off' means? Does it mean if you chose to buy their product you'll have to pay more than you'd happen to like to pay for it? There no oracle that can give us one true price, and anything above that is a 'rip off.'
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God forbid anyone make a profit? I’m not sure what your point is, prices are set by what the market is willing to pay. Anything else is not sustainable. You are not entitled to buy houses wherever you want for whatever price you think is good. Certainly not in the Bay Area.
>prices are set by what the market is willing to pay Land is not a normal good so it does not work that way even in theory. A simple example: Flint MI has falling demand and rising prices. In addition, land is used both for speculation and retirement savings, further inflating the price beyond just being a place to live. >Anything else is not sustainable Correct. An ever growing percentage of wealth will go to land o…
You are right in essence, but using the wrong terminology.
Real estate, at least the kind we're discussing, residential housing, absolutely is a normal good, normal being defined as having a positive income elasticity of demand. Simply stated, when people make more money, they want more house.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Normal_good
The supply side of the equation, what you're referring to, is less straightforward. While, the long-run price elasticity is pretty high, the short-run tends to be fairly inelastic, this is due to construction having lots of high, fixed costs, and financing tends to have very long amortization schedules. Do a lot of construction in a real estate market and it might be ten years before prices start to come down, assuming demand hasn't caught up in the interim.
Most real estate markets clear. Failure of the market to clear can have many causes, the one I see happening most often is the aforementioned low price elasticity in visible parts of dense downtowns. Political action at the local level can create an economic incentive to reduce prices to meet demand.
I think a big part of this is, like health care, insurance hiding the true cost from consumers. I have a vision plan as a benefit from my job. Covers exams and eyeware, so I have never paid more than a small co-pay for glasses and I had no idea what the cost was behind the scenes. The insurers don't care as they just pass the cost along to the employers who pay for the policies. The employers don't know any better. T…
It is worth noting that the same company selling you glasses also owns most Vision Insurance plans. The plans only cover their vendors.