Can You Buy Glasses Online?
Well, maybe the better question is should you buy glasses online. It’s an appealing proposition. You hear plenty about “The comfort of your own home” and the big one “We cut out the middleman!”. If you’re a believer that the “Free Lunch is a real thing and the car dealer is going to give you ten thousand dollars for your $200 trade-in, then online eyeglasses very well might be the place for you. But for the rest, here’s a peek at what the “middleman” does.
Here is some of the value proposition of buying on line.
Shop from home.
That certainly sounds convenient. But there are several challenges with that. First of all, you have absolutely no idea what a frame is going to look like on your face. And as we often say to our clients, “You may love the frame, but it may not love you back”. A totally stunning frame that has a shape or color that is a conflict, there’s no fixing it. And that’s before you try it on, which you can’t. One of the most crucial elements of a proper fit is the way the glasses “frame” your pupil. A round frame with a pupil at dead center looks like a target. Not a good look, and blatantly noticeable. If you have eyes closer together, pupil framing and proper shape are even more crucial. Some of the online sellers offer to send you several frames and you return what you don’t want. Having three-thousand-plus frames in stock allows us to maybe find 20 or so that hit all the right buttons. And that’s doing this hands-on, with a highly trained professional guiding the process. One benefit of purchasing online is that their typical buyer doesn’t know what they don’t know. We know this as we see a pretty steady stream of eyewear that should have never found its way to people’s faces. Not that thy are “bad” in some way. Just wrong.
You’ll see great.
Really? How are you going to fit me. I’m going to hold a credit card to my forehead and you’ll position the lenses from a cellphone pic? Seems precise….. The primary purpose of eyewear is improved vision. And that simply can’t be accomplished through guesses and estimations. Even if I can get an accurate pupil measurement, I have no idea where your pupil will center in the frame you are buying. This becomes an insurmountable problem if you wear a progressive lens. There is precious little room for error in fitting segment height. Too low and you’ll be craning your neck to read. Too high and you’ll be doing the exact opposite- chin on chest to see as you walk, drive or carry on a conversation. Either that or wearing them on the tip of your nose.
Even more importantly, there are the lenses. You may have noticed a certain lack of specific information regarding the lenses they offer. You’ll see words such as “digital freeform” and descriptors such as “premium” or “platinum” in describing their product. Advertising a lens as digital freeform is like telling someone that a particular show is being broadcast live and in living color. Impressive fifty years ago. Not so much today. What they leave out is WHO makes these lenses, WHERE these lenses are made and out of WHAT material. And when you get into progressive lenses, it becomes much more complicated. Every optical outlet has a Good/Better/Best offering for progressive lenses. That tells you little. Progressive lenses have been around longer than the vast majority of people today have been alive. And a few years after the first ones, we had Good/Better/Best. Because you need three lenses to do that. Progressive lenses are a technology product. Designing a lens that provides clear, comfortable and sharp focus requires a significant knowledge of optical physics. Over the decades, designers have been on a quest to create grind profiles with highly linear, distortion free vision with broad corridors and minimal spherical distortion. Now your Good/Better/Best selection might be the best lens ever made, the second best and the third. Or it could be that exact same thing from the 90’s. The reality is, the base material is the same (mostly). The expense is in the grinding and the grind profile. As you might imagine, this is an excellent place to hide a whole bunch of additional profit. They don’t directly tell you any of this. They leave you with “Our digital free-form Platinum lens”. Would you buy a new car and enjoy finding out it’s a brand-new 1997 version of that model?
All the top styles.
Until just a couple decades ago, there were a small number of eyeglass frame makers, a number of them in the U.S. Nowadays, every fashion brand has their own eyewear. And in just about every instance, the brand’s only involvement is receiving a payment for their name. The true reality is, virtually all of these designers are only a memory. Of the one’s still living, they’ve sold the brand to a mega corporation that leases that name out to manufacturers of a broad range of fashion product. But you probably won’t see even much of those. It’s mostly house brands and almost always Chinese-made product.
In the end…
In the end, cutting out the middleman often means reducing production and materials costs and eliminating important services. If you can live with a visual experience ranging from somewhat to substantially compromised and lower end quality and construction, then online eyeglasses are probably right for you. But most cities have a “Two for $88 and FREE eye exam” retailer that you can at least get some sort of hands-on service. But that visit will quickly bring you to the reality of the absurd concept of the “free lunch”.
In a striking bit of irony, Warby Parker, the pioneer in cutting out the middleman has opened brick and mortar stores in 200 cities across the country. In fact, the company that has yet to turn a profit is looking to retail stores to spur on their presently stalled growth and is anticipated to be their key to profitability. What happened to cutting out the middleman?
So can you really buy glasses online?
If you’re satisfied with low quality products that lack durability, a frame that most likely does not fit correctly and is even less likely to be a good fit for you, and if you don’t mind accepting sacrifices in your quality of vision, online glasses is probably a good option for you.