"Warby Parker recognized this as a business opportunity. I’m surprised others haven’t jumped in as well with reasonably priced eyewear."
This author is uninformed. Others have jumped in. And Warby Parker wasn't even the first.
15 years ago I would buy my single-vision prescription glasses from optical4less.com. The cost was $58 for 2 pairs, including worldwide shipping.
Today I buy my glasses from Zenni. Last month, I paid $176.75 total for two pairs of glasses, each with single-vision photochromic lenses (and one pair with additional blue light blocking).
You know, my family member bought a pair of cheap glasses for 2 $ in India. Granted it was probably not very powerful or may last long. But I am shocked at the definition of what is cheap. I am now skeptical if the glasses he bought actually work well enough for him.
You can buy "reading glasses" from a supermarket in Britain for $4.
They might be OK, but custom lenses will almost certainly be better.
(Also, glasses ordered online in Britain start at less than $10 a pair. Once something purchased that infrequently costs less than a McDonald's meal, there's not much pressure to further reduce the price. It's one hour work at the legal minimum wage.)
Here in the US I could buy reading glasses in a pharmacy for less than $10 (several variations). They come in a range like -2.0 to +2.0 in increments of 0.25.
I don't wear glasses, but I suppose I did I could get something that roughly works for me for a price of a coffee and a couple of doughnuts. These glasses don't look cool, but don't look ugly either, they are just extremely basic. Likely fine for reading at home.
They are also on Amazon. There are folding reading glasses that go from 1.0x to 4.0x that are $15 for 2 pair. I keep one on me for really tiny print. It even survived ending up in the washing machine.
Sure, it's enough to pay for the materials (frames cost pennies, and cheap lenses maybe $1?).
But someone still has to cut the the lenses to size, and fit them to the frame. This requires both equipment and skill.
I don't think I've ever paid less than $15-$20 for prescription single-vision glasses. I've paid more even in the 'wholesale' optical market in Beijing.
$2 is easily achievable for reading glasses, which are mass produced with lenses installed at the factory.
Skilled labor is dirt cheap in India. Most car mechanics will do an oil and filter change for INR 200 (USD 2.46) if you bring your own materials. Practically a rounding error.
(not indian but this is my impression from what I've read)
india has a very weird medical economy at times, geared to the costs necessary to deliver ultra-basic care to many people who are dirt-poor, utilizing generics (occasionally of questionable quality), the ultra-cheap cost of labor, etc.
for example centchroman is an interesting case-study... the government basically paid to develop and take it through trials and it was generic from day-1, and then the generics manufacturers go to work and you have birth control that can be delivered to market for under a dollar a month (4 pills) in retail quantities, and the government distributes them free because it's cheaper than pregnancy/social services.
Not that at the high level, the care isn't great, but, a lot of india is super poor and underdeveloped and delivering core medicines cheaply is relatively effective to provide a super basic level of care, they have a focus on delivering super cheap generics that cover the basic use-cases. I'm sure the glasses are cheap shitty molded plastic or something, or at most a super basic molded glass lens, perhaps with some subsidies. I'm mentally imagining the "BCG" glasses from basic training, designed to be indestructible and unscratchable (aka the birth control glasses).
But that is the 80% solution, make em cheap and polish em up with super cheap labor and with basic materials you probably can get that down to 2 bucks or within subsidy distance of that.
India has very low labor costs, so you get a lot if all you need is something you can get by paying someone to do something with materials on hand, without substantial energy or rare materials.
I have used an Indian online site [1] to order a really good pair of glasses. It cost me $150, but I found the quality to be much better than what I could get in the US.
you ordered from a brand which is considered premium in India. You can get similar kind of glasses at even lower price at lenskart.com and from local stores.
Glass lenses cost me Rs 1000 (about $12.5) a few months back (myopia, -5) - I'd say these were on the cheaper side, and no special coating (they cost as much as the lenses themselves!!). Frames on the cheaper end also cost around this much.
I also prefer glass lenses. The tradeoffs seem to be weight (glass weighs more) and durability (glass can be cleaned with cloth or a towel without scratching, plastic lenses need to be babied with a microcloth or else you get little swirly scratches that will eventually ruin the lenses).
I'd rather have my glasses weigh a bit more if the lenses are more durable.
The scratches are caused by particles of dust pressed by you against the lens, and then rubbed all around. A quick rinse removes almost all the dust, and then you can dry them with any clean towel, tissue or even the shirt. I also use a drop of soap to degrease them.
I have plastic lenses with zero scratches after five years of use.
Oh, I know about this. I did rinse them thoroughly. Then I used a few drops of Dawn dish detergent to wash them. But what I found was that even if you clean plastic lenses thoroughly, what counts is how you dry them. If you use paper or even a towel it can scratch them incrementally over time.
It's so much more convenient (or maybe I'm just lazy!) to be able to dry glass lenses with a towel, paper towel, a t-shirt, or anything absorbent.
Interesting. Are you referring to Windex or one of the optical-grade solutions? I used to use dish soap but I found that I can just run mine under warm water for thirty seconds or so and that gets them pretty clean.
Yeah, scratching was the biggest reason I went back to glasses. Got a plastic one last year and within months it got plenty of scratches. Before that I had glass lenses that lasted more than 5 years (though one of lenses did break, which is why I wanted to try plastic).
$2 is cheap, but the best glasses I've ever bought start at $6, up to $30 for all the filters, so I'm not surprised you can buy something useful for $2.
Yup, Zenni is like 20 years old. My partner worked there for 7 years on the eyewear supply chain and catalog. There are tons and tons of low-cost eyewear startups like payneglasses.com
Agreed! I love Payne. I have over 100 pair because it's so inexpensive to buy online. Why not have multiple pair? You can get sunglasses or computer glasses, so you're not just stuck with one pair.
When you buy glasses from a bricks and mortar optician, you're getting whatever bog-standard lenses they sell, unless they specifically mention they're high index, or have some specific feature/coating, or are from some specific manufacturer.
Just like when you buy glasses online.
There are definitely differences in lens quality, but the available range is just as wide in retail stores as it is online.
The high end luxury brands such as Silhouette offer very advanced lens coatings and materials that aren't found in any of the discount stores online or brick-and-mortar, so there's definitely a difference there. It's only their full priced partner shops that carry them. They also claim to use custom technology that allows their 10+ layers of coatings to stick together much better and not flake off.
The mid range to entry luxury brands, many owned by Luxottica, use broadly available lenses and coatings, or so the discount online stores claim.
I've never been to a discount brick-and-mortar store selling the full range of Luxottica products, usually only a few styles here and there. So I can't comment there.
What I'm asking is if the claims of discount stores, like that they have access to the same lenses as full priced Luxottica stores, are actually true.
And whether they are honest with their shipped product.
e.g. How would anyone know if they in fact got a X layer coated lens (where X could be from 3 to 8) from a discount shop?
It seems trivial to ship a X-1 layer coated lens instead, with a very low possibility of getting caught.
Presuming that they have multiple different lenses in stock you can compare them side by side visually?
You can wet them, shine a flashlight, put them under the sun for transition lenses, etc...
Not foolproof, but it would make it harder to substitute the lower end lenses, 3 coatings vs 2 coating would likely be noticeable.
8 coatings vs 7 coatings might not be.
So for the mid range and above it probably doesn't make sense to discount shop at all. Your entirely trusting the brand reputation or shop reputation on whether they will deliver.
So we can't trust the store to give us the glasses we ordered, we need to test them. To get a control to test against, we're then going to...trust the store and have them provide the control?
How do you know those glasses on the counter touting 8 layers actually has those 8 layers?
It kind of sounds like all you can really do is see if the glasses have the features you requested. Do they transition? Does it seem like they transition as much as you were wanting? Do they seem like they don't have bad glare? Does it attenuate the glare as much as you were wanting? If not, then return them. This is entirely possible with online glasses retailers, they usually have decently generous return policies.
People don't buy glasses because they have 8 layers instead of 7. They buy them because those layers give additional features and it's the features they want. If they can do the features you want in 7 layers instead of 8, does it really matter if it's only 7 layers?
Well that’s why I mentioned in-store testing would likely only be useful for low end lenses.
For mid range to high end lenses it would probably be impossible to confirm the actual layer count without destructive testing.
Of course it would be reputation and gut-feel-perception based for most buyers in any case.
However, for the higher end stuff, gut-feel-perception probably wouldn’t be able to tell the difference. Human eyes can’t perceive the strength of lamination between layers, for example.
So it would be entirely reputation based at the higher end.
Which probably explains why high end glasses are vastly more expensive then Warby Parker and other discount places…
What a weird argument. Obviously a company can go n-layers deep when it comes to misdirection, but I'd say going to a store to physically inspect what you're getting is a much better option than blindly trusting everything they tell you.
In a store you can compare things side by side. If you order something, you get what you get and have no frame of reference.
This author is uninformed. Others have jumped in. And Warby Parker wasn't even the first.
15 years ago I would buy my single-vision prescription glasses from optical4less.com. The cost was $58 for 2 pairs, including worldwide shipping.
Today I buy my glasses from Zenni. Last month, I paid $176.75 total for two pairs of glasses, each with single-vision photochromic lenses (and one pair with additional blue light blocking).