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Comment by monkeypizza | Hacker News Reader

Zenni, eyebuydirect, goggle4u are all in this space and provide cheaper glasses. It seems like new ones keep starting, then slowly raise prices, leaving a gap for a new minimum cost provider.

Eyeglasses are an interesting example of a market failure - customers have been paying 10x the actual price for an important item, for 20+ years, and the market hasn't fixed it.

In Beijing I used to just head down to Panjiayuan Zhaojia Glasses City and get pairs for ~15 bucks. Rest your head on a machine that reads your prescription, pick out frames, bargain, 30 minutes later you have your glasses.

In the US glasses are medicalized, which hides the reality that glasses are really cheap and simple to make; for people without money this causes real harm.

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Yup. My wife works at Zenni in the manufacturing and product. I even tagged along twice to Danyang (Spectacle City). It's hard for another company to come in offering $7 glasses including lenses to the US when you don't have the supply chain optimized (incl. in-house manufacturing of certain parts) and the economies of scale and relationships with suppliers.

And then to deal with the sheer operations (talking like ten thousand plus frames per day).

In the US the optometrist (eye doctor with no MD) makes most of their money from selling marked up prescription glasses.

EyeBuyDirect is owned by Essilor, which merged with Luxottica last year.

I think that the same is true for hearing aids.

Hearing aids are actually quite complicated little machines compared to a pair of lenses.

can't remember the name of the place, but there's a low cost franchise place I went to a few years back. I had a prescription from eye exam, but they'd do those there too. I was in, chose some frames, had my stuff done in about 45 minutes. 3 frames - one was $$ because I chose rimless, but I got 2 backup pairs as well - total cost was a bit under $200. Had I not chosen rimless, and just got the 'regular' basic frames... would have been ~$60?.

They had a deal at that time too - $99 for exam and one frame/lens set, done in a couple hours.

They're fine - have worn every day for 3 years. No 'insurance' to worry about.

Was it Jins?

looking now I think it was eyemart express. I'd lost my glasses the day before and had a long trip coming up the next day (driving). I mostly use the glasses for driving, and couldn't find anyone who could necessarily guarantee same day service - had called some of the usual places that advertise that and got "well, maybe, we're backed up, call back this afternoon, etc". eyemart was, I think, relatively new at that location, so wasn't backed up.

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