Glasses Bought at Traditional Retailers so Expensive

Glasses Bought at Traditional Retailers so Expensive

This is my theory: prescription eyewear was originally sold by mostly optometrist owned-and-operated shops. The O.D. was highly trained, had significant school debt, and high wage expectations. Beyond this, s/he had a comparatively tiny base of customers. After all, how lots of people can an optometrist even see in a day? Possibly ten at most?

optometrist salary

Why do shops charge 3-4x more for a pair of prescription glasses than any of the multitude of online eyewear retailers? The dramatic cost difference reflects something much over the cost difference between doing business online or in a brick and mortar store.

This went on for lots of years and decades. Local eye doctors held all of the expertise on eyesight and charged an amount reflective of their expertise, their brick and mortar presence and staff time, and their comparatively low-volume of sales. A pair of glasses, therefore, would often cost well over $300.

These key factors--high earnings expectations as well as a tiny customer base--resulted in a predictable outcome: a necessity to charge high prices for prescription glasses. This was then reinforced by the emergent eye insurance industry, which distributed the $400 glasses and $150 examination in to 12 neat, every month insurance premiums covered by the patient's employer.

Then came department stores. These stores brought a revolution to commodity shopping and drove smaller, low-volume mom & pops out of business. Their reach became ever more broad and finally commoditized one time specialized service-based industries such as hair-dressing and, yes, optometry.

optometrist salary

But the huge box retailers did not base their cost on the true cost of providing a pair of eyeglasses. In lieu, the cost was based on what consumers were "used to" paying, based on their experience at the local optometrist. The huge box chopped 30% or 40% off this cost and offered glasses that were priced competitively in relation to the local ecomony, but did still not reflect the true perfect-competition cost of eyewear.

Speedy forward a few years. The net democratizes information, levels the playing field, and allows for some actual competition in the eyewear industry. Beyond this, companies could reach a worldwide customer base and could depend on an eye examination done elsewhere. Expertise smoothed the technique of providing a custom product to hundreds of thousands of consumers, and the one time specialized, individualized experience of buying glasses from an individual, highly-paid eye doctor, became basically a matter of filling an order.

optometrist salary