Massive deflation in eyeglasses

[blazespinnaker]

Anyone see clearlycontacts.ca?

I used to pay like $200+ for eyeglasses, now you can get primo styling frames and lenses for $70.

I just had a groupon in my email account from an eyeglass store that's giving a $200 coupon for $68 bux.

It's massive deflation caused by disintermediation of the internet.

[ggirod]

Re: Massive deflation in eyeglasses

I think it is more decreased demand and rather inflexible capacity. Everybody and his uncle ran eyeglass machines making glasses while you wait and getting paid a small fortune by insurance. For wise companies, those machines could be sunk costs but the machine needs to be used.

Eyeglasses are an easily postponed purchase in most cases, so unless they get destroyed somehow, people can use their glasses (with some inconvenience) for years. I suspect that is more the case than Internet disintermediation since most people want to try on frames and select details of their glasses when, finally, they get some. Further, time was that glasses were covered by health insurers and people could get new glasses every two years. Wanna bet that little fringe is pretty scarce now? It is good news, though, that glasses are cheap - I will have to check that out because mine are probably four years old now.

[dbarberic]

Re: Massive deflation in eyeglasses

Deflation in eye-glasses? Huh?

I just paid a little over $1K after so-called eye care insurance benefit and coupons for two pair of glasses and two pair of perscription sunglasses for both my wife and I (~$250 per pair) from Pearl Vision!

I typically get new glasses roughly every two years and I've never walked out spending less than $250/pair no matter what coupons I have over the past decade. Maybe its because my vision is so poor (north of 20 over 2,000) and I have to get the most expensive lens option so they do not look like Coke bottles on my face.

Usually the advertised $75 frame and lens special is for a very small selection of frames to choose from (usually they are all horrible looking) and is for the most basic glass lens (no special coatings or ultra-thin/ultra-light for people with very poor vision).

[c1ue]

Re: Massive deflation in eyeglasses

That, and Groupon is well known for its scams.

I still remember how Groupon advertising iPhones for $99 - and it turned out it was Groupon itself that had put up 2 phones just to drive traffic.

Everywhere you go, Groupon has a banner ad on the page somewhere.

Gigantic scheme to defraud investors.

[don]

Re: Massive deflation in eyeglasses

How much of the deflation in glasses is the growing necessity for many to buy Dr. Dean Edell's

[Spartacus]

Re: Massive deflation in eyeglasses

Some of the retailers have tried to fight back; the optometrists no longer write some of the required numbers down on the prescription.

or $10 from Zinni (shipped from deepest Born^H^H^H^H^^H China - Looked like it was direct from a person in a village in China who did the final assembly.)

BUT those cheapest sources don't have equal quality yet. None of them has full flexon, for example - they do some kind of cheap alloy for the frame and flexon for the arms only.

I've been getting all flexon frames for 11 years because I used to destroy glasses regularly, and the flexon lasted a LOT longer.

Anyone see clearlycontacts.ca?

I used to pay like $200+ for eyeglasses, now you can get primo styling frames and lenses for $70.

I just had a groupon in my email account from an eyeglass store that's giving a $200 coupon for $68 bux.

It's massive deflation caused by disintermediation of the internet.

I got a pair of Vibrams for $30 the same way because I could not find them locally (Canada's a low priority market for Vibram, I hear the NY and SF stores are always stocked). Later I got some locally. Identical packaging, brochures, everything ... they are a knockoff though, because I learned later Vibram does not allow any store that does not have a storefront to sell them over the internet. This was a mistake though ... the stitching on the mail order ones broke down after a couple of weeks. I put them back together & they gave out completely around 5 months of use. Granted, I was walking at least 6 hours per day in them.

[ThePythonicCow]

Re: Massive deflation in eyeglasses

Anyone see clearlycontacts.ca?

I've been getting my eyeglasses over the Internet for years. I usually use 39dollarglasses.com. My favorite pair has SeikoŽ Super-High Index lenses and bendable titanium frames, for a cost of about $170 (including coatings and shipping.) I'm a fanactic for light weight glasses -- these ended up at 15 grams, total weight.

One thing I like is that the on-line glass stores don't care one twit whether my prescription is recently issued or not. Perhaps ten years ago, I got a prescription that I keep using the numbers from, adapting them over time for my needs change. I have a strong (short focus) set next to my reading table, a medium set by my computer desk, and a weak set (longer distance focus) for driving.

Their website is arranged in a sufficiently straight forward way that I was able to automatically download the details of every single frame and then sort and search for what I was looking for (light weight, wide nose, certain frame size, ...) I was able to get exactly the frame I wanted this way.

Much of Internet shopping is like that, in my view. It offers a variety of inventory that just cannot be provided economically in thousands of local retail shops.

The idea of individually shipping something to one's doorstep seems intuitively wasteful, but actually it is the other way around. The UPS driver only adds another couple of minutes and a fraction of a mile to his route to drop something off at my doorstep, whereas I would have to drive five or ten miles and spend 20 or 30 minutes in transit to visit the typical shop near me (not to mention what it would take me to visit all shops near here of a given kind.)

Price is usually a secondary concern. Many items that I get on the Web simply cannot be purchased locally, such as a particular kind of Goji berries from the Himalayas, or Matcha tea from Japan, or sardines from the Mediterranean, or ...