Home | Baseball | First Division
"FOR YEARS I'VE BEEN wondering why eyeglasses cost so much. Even at LensCrafters, which is to eye glasses what Gap is to clothes, you can easily pay $500 for a few pieces of eyeglass lenses and screws. The last instant I went in, I tried on a $250 pair of retro-librarian eyeglasses that made me look real smart. So smart that I asked the sales gentleman why they cost so much. He gave me a weird look. "They're designer," he huffed. That did it. With a little exploring, I found online USA eyewear shops providing a much more cheap alternative. Seven years ago a New York City optician sold his three Manhattan retail locations to start a cheaper-eyeglasses dot com, one of the developing quantity of discount-eyeglasses Web sites. By typing in your prescription and dimensions, you can buy a decent set of eyeglasses off his website for as little as $28. His secret: He built a lab in the suburban outskirts of Brooklyn. His two Ukrainian assistants, Vladimir and Alex, grind 20 to 50 pairs of eye glasses a day under the fluorescent lights, using the same equipment you'd locate in the back of an optician's store. Alex is moonlighting from his job building lenses for - you guessed it - LensCrafters. Of course, the first thing I ask is why eyeglasses cost hundreds of dollars at the representative eyeglasses store. "I used to buy frames for $20 and sell them for $200," he recalls. He actually starts laughing. "Yup. It's crazy!" This confirmed my most awful worries. Sure, you expect merchants to charge something above wholesale to make a return. A representative fashion store might double its wholesale costs to come up with a retail price, for example. But some opticians mark up frames as much as 1,000%. That most likely explains why bazillionaire Leonardo Del Vecchio, the guy who owns chief chains such as LensCrafters, Sunglass Hut and Pearle Vision, ranks among the world's 50 wealthiest men. "Del Vecchio is raking in the money!" says Appelbaum, sounding a tad envious. "He has truckloads of it!" As outrageous as these markups sound, your typical storefront eyeglasses shop relies on them just to get by. According to Dublin-based research firm Research and Markets, most do less than $500,000 a year in sales, and like any retail operation, a big hunk of that goes to pay the rent and sales personnel. If eyewear stores offer a gratis eye exam, the cost of your specs is also footing the bill for the optometrist's $100,000 salary. And if they make your glasses while you wait, you're also paying for $500,000 in in-store lab equipment. When all's said and done, a typical optician makes a 15 to 20% profit on the average sale - about the same margin cheap online eye glasses stores enjoy. LensCrafters, which declined to comment, perhaps doesn't have much to fear from web based marketers. Online eye glasses stores offer such low prices and a 30-day guarantee because a large amount folks are still too fearful to order bifocals on the Internet. Still, there may be a little movement going on. Eagan, Minn., blogger Ira Mitchell, whose musings about photography and electronics used to attract about 50 readers a day, recently posted an essay titled, "Eyeglass stores are for suckers." Within 24 hours, he says, more than 50,000 readers flocked to his blog to gripe about their own overpriced eye glasses and talk about the benefits of buying online. Back at the LensCrafters store, I ask the sales guy if I can get a discount. He says no, but offers to charge my purchase to a LensCrafters credit card. "You won't have to make any payments for the first three months!" he says. It gradually dawns on me: The eyeglasses are so costly they come with their own financing plan. Maybe it's time to take a $28 gamble with online eyewear as long as it is from a USA registered FDA optical lab! Because there are no certification nor governement safeguards in foreign markets like China, consumers should trust their vision to USA regulated FDA registered labs."
Article Source: http://sports-articles.net
Follow SmartMoney for sources of USA Quality Prescrition cheap eye glasses, and insure your eyeglasses are USA processed in FDA registered optical labs.
Please Rate this Article
5 out of 54 out of 53 out of 52 out of 51 out of 5
Not yet Rated
