Why are Glasses Bought at Vintage Retailers so Expensive?

Why do retail stores charge 3-4x more for a pair of prescription glasses than any of these multitude of online eye protection retailers? The dramatic price difference reflects something greater than the cost difference between doing work online or in a local store.

This is i do theory: prescription eyewear wasn't originally sold by usually optometrist owned-and-operated shops. Making a O. D. was skilled, had significant school debt consolidation loans, and high salary expects. Beyond this, s/he had a relatively small base of consumers. After all, how many people will have the ability an optometrist even see on a daily basis? Maybe 10 at much of these?

These two key factors--high earnings expectations along with a small customer base--resulted in a predictable outcome: a making it very charge high prices going for prescription glasses. This ended up being reinforced by the emergent iris insurance industry, which distributed evenly the $400 glasses and requirements $150 exam into 12 ideal, monthly insurance premiums covered by the patient's employer.

This continued for decades and months or even years. Local eye doctors held all your expertise on eyesight and charged little bit reflective of their persona, their brick and mortar amount and staff time, with their relatively low-volume of cashflow. A pair of sunglasses, therefore, would often cost in excess of $300.

Then came department stores. These stores brought the revolution to commodity obtains and drove smaller, low-volume mom & pops out of industrial. Their reach became large numbers of broad and eventually commoditized considering that specialized service-based industries is actually hair-dressing and, yes, optometry.

But the big box retailers by no means base their price into your true cost of providing a pair of eyeglasses. Instead, the cost derived from what consumers were "used to" pay back, based on their experience about the local optometrist. The big box try cutting 30% or 40% on this price and offered glasses this was priced very competitively in regards to the local ecomony, but did still not reflect the particular perfect-competition price of glasses.

Fast forward a several years. The internet democratizes instructions, levels the playing profession, and allows for some real competition if there is eyewear industry. Beyond it, companies could reach a global customer base and could trust an eye examination distributed elsewhere. Technology smoothed the process of providing a custom product to untold numbers of consumers, and this is once specialized, individualized connection with buying glasses from you'll want to, highly-paid eye doctor, became simply a matter of filling an order.

That, I feel, is why glasses are so expensive when bought if there is usual way.

.