Luxottica: the illusion of choice and what you’re really getting when you spend hundreds of dollars on glasses.
This documentary was broadcast 13 years ago. Since then, Luxottica, the monopolistic Italian frames manufacturer, merged with Essilor, the largest ophthalmic lens manufacturer in the world. Today, EssilorLuxottica vertically controls 80% of the eyewear industry.
Here are more recent documentaries about EssilorLuxottica:
Ive been ordering my glasses online for years now about 100$USD a pair just need to know your eye chart numbers.
The reason its expensive is because normal people just trying to get through the day don’t know any better and think you need to buy them in a physical store that jacks up hunks of plastic by 5000% profit because their parents did it that way for them as kids.
Its purely predation that relies on consumer complacency. There was a time they could get away with the racket because you had no other options and precision lenses were difficult to produce. Now everything is cheap and easy to manufacture in mail order.
Spin the wheel on some clearance frames online.
I’m not going to disclose where I buy my glasses but when I bought it locally, I could very easily spend above 300€ for stock lenses and a basic frame.
I needed a lense change every two, at best, three years. Between wear and prescription change, it was necessary.
One year I spend nearly 400€ on prescription glasses. Under less than 3 months I have a lense peeling, the coating flaking off the surface. I file a complaint and the lense is sent to the manufacturer for evaluation abd it is found I am to blame. No exchange, no refund.
I decide to take a gamble, go to an Ophthalmologist, get a medical prescription issued, and then have my glasses executed externally. All things added, I spent 130€ to replace my glasses.
The next time I go see the same doctor for a checkup, I get complimented on the quality of the lenses I have but criticized for overkill (very low thickness, which I really don’t require, anti reflex, UV, scratch resistant, etc).
I have never bought glasses again in my local market.
I’m not going to disclose where I buy my glasses
Why not? Do share 🙂
I don’t pay for frames and I can get single vision lenses for relatively cheap - like $70 a pair. That’s because single-vision lens blanks are mass-produced in molds, so all the lens manufacturer has to do is pull the correct pre-made blanks and edge them.
So my single vision glasses cost $70. Not as cheap as they could be, but my lenses last a few years since I’m careful and my vision doesn’t change too much, so it’s okay.
But the real killers are my progressive lenses: the last pair I ordered cost me $600. Progressive lenses are ground to order, so I get the price difference. But still… $600 is really quite steep. I buy custom-made things that are way more complicated to make than machine-ground lenses for a lot less.
I shared it once when I was still on Reddit and the lot came down on my head.
I had a pair of progressives made for my father in law at the same place and what would be a 1300€ total, locally, got knocked down to a bit less than €200, doctor apointment included.
5 years later, the glasses are still perfect.
Reddit isn’t real, it can’t hurt you
Because companies like money and people are willing to pay it?
That’s only partially true. When you need glasses, it’s not so much that you’re willing to pay for it, it’s that you have to.
It’s true that you can go to the eye doctor, get a prescription, then take the time to shop around - possibly take a chance ordering online - to get glasses on the cheap. But realistically, most people don’t do that. They need glasses and they go to their local brick-and-mortar, and cheaper alternatives are rarely so massively cheaper that it’s worth taking the time to find them because they need the glasses right now. And the insurance possibly covers part of the cost so it looks less bad.
That’s how companies like Luxottica get away with setting high prices and saying “people are willing to pay for it”. They know consumers aren’t perfectly rational buyers and they create enough friction in the marketplace to get people to suck it up, particularly since glasses are more a need than a want most of the time.
I buy 3 pair of sunglasses for $20. e.g. glasses are not expensive. Expensive glasses are expensive.
I’m guessing you don’t need prescription lenses. Correct?
And yeah, I’ll agree with you that overpriced designer brands are overpriced. That’s the case with designer anything. But if you just need basic, good quality glasses simply to see correctly, you still end up paying a lot of money because the market is captive.
Buy online. Way cheaper. Zenni is great
The thumbnails say Chanel, Prada, Vogue. The 60 minutes video mentions Tiffany in the first few minutes. She even says “well, they can be expensive”.
Are you suggesting that it is simply not possible to find reasonably priced prescription glasses that are not luxury brands?
The documentaries aren’t only about designer brands. The excessive markup also concerns more mundane frames.
It is of course possible to find cheaper prescription glasses. The point is that EssilorLuxottica heavily impedes healthy competition in the entire eyewear industry, and you could be paying far less if the market was truly free.
I’ll tell you two anecdotes that illustrates this:
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When I go to any of my local opticians to order lenses - all Luxottica outfits - I tell them I have my own frames and I’ll be doing the fitting myself. I don’t want their service: all I need them for is as a vehicle to order lenses, because I can’t order direct from Hoya. Each time, they charge me between $25 and $50 because I didn’t buy frames from them. And they do that because everybody else does that too, so they know I have no other alternatives.
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I have a friend in Australia who regularly vacations in Indonesia, Malaysia, Taiwan, Hong Kong… and he told me that, for his simple prescription, he can get an eye exam, lenses for his correction cut and mounted onto frames in one hour for a few dollars, and each time he goes on vacation, he gets 4 or 5 pairs made because it’s so damn cheap. Why? Because it’s all stuff made in China and sold at normal markup.
Glasses are a solved problem, and a centuries-old technology. They should be a commodity. They have no reason to be sold at anywhere near the price they’re sold at.
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