Similarly: screen your optician by what eyewear brands they carry. I saw a “independent” for years that carried small brands and I felt the doctors philosophy was better aligned with patient care vs sales.
How badly are we being ripped off on eyewear? Former industry execs tell all
251–260 of 317 posts
Re: How badly are we being ripped off on eyewear? Former industry execs tell all
#252It'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?
At one point I made a list of biggest expenses a person faces in their lives and was shocked to realize that pretty much everywhere there is either a company or consortium that has captured the market and manages 'access' to it. This is not surprising. in fact I would imagine that as more and more automation takes hold & marginal cost to produce real goods falls to near zero you'll see only the players left standing will be the ones either with some kind of an "in" or monopolies.
If you probe further you'll realize the companies with largest margins (basically ripoffs or to use Mr Buffets's lingo 'moats') will be (are?) the ones with most resources to spare on marketing and media. so the inevitable outcome will be massive corruption of public discourse and loss of clarity for common man. sounds familiar?
Re: How badly are we being ripped off on eyewear? Former industry execs tell all
#253I was able to slash my eyeglasses expenditures in both the exams and the frames: eye exams: I used to pay the optometrist $153 ($117 refraction + $36 dilation). I later found out that Costco often has an optometrist on site in a tiny office and will charge just $59 (and add +$20 for dilation). That's less than half the cost of most other optometrists. frames: switched to Zenni online to avoid the LensCrafters/Pearle/…
U.K. tips, along similar lines...
Most high street stores do free eye tests to get you in the door. The price will be around £20, but free vouchers in papers, leaflets, in store, online, etc, are very available. You could probably just ask for a free one.
Alternatively, if you use a computer enough in your work, I believe your company is required to cover eye tests.
Lastly, but online. Get your prescription from the store and don’t buy in store. Go to somewhere like Glasses Direct, a Warburg Parker equivalent for the U.K., and buy from their own brand ranges if you can. They are typically £25-100 for frames, and almost always buy one get one free.
Between these tips, I tend to get a new pair of glasses and prescription sunglasses, with good lens coatings on both, and going for more fashionable frames, for about £120 all in (2 pairs). As a student I did this and was spending about £60, and that’s every 2 years or so as my eyes change and glasses break.
Conversely I have family who spend £250+ a pop on the high street.
Re: How badly are we being ripped off on eyewear? Former industry execs tell all
#254Earlier quoted context omitted.
>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…
> Land is not a normal good, it does not work that way. 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 equa…
I see I also blurred construction costs with land costs and new housing with existing stock. I probably should have been more precise and less rhetorical.
But yeah something like moving zoning decisions to State level and financial incentives for development vs under developed parcels would help.
Re: How badly are we being ripped off on eyewear? Former industry execs tell all
#255Seems 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…
My brother actually has a company called OnSightEyes.com which uses a smartphone-powered device to measure prescriptions. Their model is to show up at companies and run diagnostics for their employees which are then covered by insurance.
They still need an optometrist on-site, and they have a bunch of sample frames you can try on and order right there, and/or have sets you like sent directly to you to try on later so your partner can weigh in / you can take you time, etc.
Glasses take about a week once ordered and are typically priced such that they're fully covered by insurance. I felt like they were comparable to Warby Parker quality as well.
I was a guinea pig to give them feedback and it was VERY slick - I feel like it took only a few minutes. Way better than the A/B optometrist process and opaque and expensive frame / coatings upsell.
Anyways, apologies for sounding like infomercial - it's just they do a really good job with an upgrade on the kind of device you're talking about so I figured I'd share exactly how it works.
I feel like their main limitation is finding optometrists in new cities who are willing to "try something new" to run diagnosis events - who unsurprisingly tend to be younger doctors less invested in the legacy diagnosis model.
Re: How badly are we being ripped off on eyewear? Former industry execs tell all
#256Earlier quoted context omitted.
Regulatory burden - building code, permitting, etc make it relatively better and less risky to build bigger, nice homes. It gives you padding if it takes a while to sell, has extra change order, or gets stuck in permit/planning and zoning limbo for a year. If the margins are paper thin, the risk is too large, so the only way to mitigate that risk is to make more expensive homes so that even if things go terribly wron…
Offhand thought. Building costs in urban area's are stuck in a high cost 'peak'. Everything is expensive which makes construction expensive. My experience renting some warehouse space in SF. One building three units. Used to be occupied by three roofing companies. And some meth heads living in the old offices. One of the roofing companies bought it, kicked out one of the other roofing companies and the methheads and…
It's a good thought. And contractors are virtually all commuters. There's a lot more driving than in most professions I can think of. In cities with awful traffic, going and buying more screws or plywood might be a day-ending problem. you might wait extra hours for deliveries, too.
All in all, frictional losses/expenses building in a city are probably very high in aggregate. The few builders I know sure seems to spend a long time waiting. Meanwhile, when I lived in CT, a round trip to the hardware store usually took about 30 minutes max.
I wonder if/when those frictional losses/problems building in dense cities actually balance out with the gains in reduced commutes and greater efficiency of urban life once those buildings are occupied.
Re: How badly are we being ripped off on eyewear? Former industry execs tell all
#257People who buy hoity-toity "designer fashion" items are paying for those D&G or whatever letters on the item. I find it impossible to work up any sympathy.
I get Flexon frames. Actually, I haven't bought frames in years. I just have them put new lenses in the "time before last" frames. So, maybe Flexon has inflated in price, too, in the past few years.
But the fact that I'm still happily wearing Flexon frames from years ago, and they still look just fine, and are still comfortable, means it doesn't affect me.
They do gouge for some of the stuff I get on the lenses; anti-glare, scratch resistant, progressive multifocal. I could cheap out on some of this, but this, at least, is functional, not "Oh, look how kuuuul I am, my glasses have a "D&G" on them!" crap.
Re: How badly are we being ripped off on eyewear? Former industry execs tell all
#258I worked in the industry until a little over a decade ago, putting myself through an engineering degree. The company I started with was bought by LensCrafters, but before it was we pretty much knew the wholesale prices on everything. After LC, LC just distributed stock to us so we didn't follow pricing. I was always amazed at the markup. A pair of Sola lens blanks for FT28 bifocals was about $3.50. A typical name bra…
Do you have any recollection what the blanks for higher index materials cost? Zenni's fancier materials are completely lackluster (Abbe wise), and I'm curious if that's because the proprietary high index materials are really so expensive that it would be out of their market, or if Luxottica's anticompetitive behavior extends deep into the supply chain as well.
They weren’t that much more. In the $5 - $10 range for most, but I don’t recall specifics. We did so many FT28 CR39 lenses at that time that’s why I recalled those easily.
There were some progressives that cost us over a hundred but that included lab work as they wouldn’t let us process them.
Edit: I wanna re emphasize that all this was prior to LC (US Shoe bought us then Lux bought US Shoe actually) buying us. I don’t know what prices did after that.
Re: How badly are we being ripped off on eyewear? Former industry execs tell all
#259Earlier quoted context omitted.
> The land, on the other hand, costs more than that alone in major cities. You can build apartment buildings 5, 10, 20 or even 80 floors high. The cost of land per apartment can be made quite small by building higher.
As you build up, the construction costs (and ongoing maintenance costs) per square foot of livable space can increase significantly, though. You need more engineering, more expensive materials, fancy cranes, extra safety procedures, etc. Plus more of the potentially livable floor space is instead taken up by elevator shafts and machinery.
Here's one almost 30 stories high apartment building in a place where the location and land don't have too much value as such (Atlantic City). 1,000 sq.ft. 2br condos seem to be priced from $160,000 to $250,000.
Re: How badly are we being ripped off on eyewear? Former industry execs tell all
#260Earlier quoted context omitted.
Some of these apps exist, but none are as accurate as a ruler and two post-it notes with a pinhole. If Apple opens up the depth sensor on the iPhone camera, such apps will be more accurate.
The trouble with do it yourself measurement of the distance between eyes is that it's done with eyes that need glasses, without wearing them. You need a second person or hardware.
In my case, my distance vision is bad, but a meter away is sharp without correction. In fact, I’ve never had a prescription that doesn’t f-up my near vision, so I had to do the measurement without glasses on.