One of the pains in the ass of moving to a new place is finding a new one of all the basic things you don't need often but need more often than Never. Eye doctors are a great example. Is the eye doctor an integral part of your life, your thoughts, and your routine? No. But you do need to see one annually, or whatever.
I chose a local optometrist essentially at random and got my eye exam. Lots of euphemisms were used to avoid telling me, "You're aging so your vision will continue to get weaker." Very kind of him. Like most people I have no vision insurance, so the exam was paid for out of pocket.
I understand that most optometrists make their money not by doing eye exams but by selling glasses; lenses, frames, or both. There's a healthy markup involved, which we all know now because we can compare the prices the brick-and-mortar optometrist charges with internet prices. What they desperately want their patients to do, of course, is to buy the glasses from them before they go home and order them online for less money. I get it. It's how they make their cash.
This place hit me (and presumably all customers) with a heavy dose of "Support your local small business please" including putting a large gold sticker bearing that phrase on my prescription – no doubt aimed at inducing some pangs of guilt when I entered my prescription online. Fortunately for them, I prefer not to order stuff online when I can buy the same thing locally with minimal effort. So they didn't need to preach at me, I was prepared to pay higher than Discount Eye Place Dot Com prices to, well, obey the sticker.
My better half had already purchased frames for me as a birthday gift. Lovely. So, I said, I'll be a lenses-only customer. I've bought glasses both online and from brick-mortar shops before. I know what lenses cost, roughly. Same with frames.
Based on my prescription for progressive lenses, the price they quoted me was – I shit you not here – $1060 plus tax. Just for the lenses. $1100, essentially. It turned into a Monty Python routine for a second, me asking him to repeat it twice to make sure I wasn't mishearing him or having a stroke.
I looked calmly at him, not sure if I should start laughing, and said, "No. No, that's not what lenses cost." And then I walked out and went home. Tried several places online. All prices were between $200-300. It suddenly felt like they were asking me "Please buy local!" with a big smile, but also giving me the finger with that price.
Look. I get it. Online is always cheaper because their overhead is minimal. I was prepared for it to cost more. But…not three or four times more. That's just dumb. And the thing that really irritated me is: You know goddamn well they aren't making those lenses in-house. They're being made somewhere else – maybe even at the exact same Lens-o-Matic Factory all the online places use to manufacture their lenses! – and shipped out. It's farmed out to the lowest cost supplier.
The only rational explanation I could concoct is that perhaps the local universities (the megaemployers of the region) have vision insurance plans and the optometrists maximize their prices according to the limits of what those insurers will cover. If Vision Insurance says they reimburse up to $1060 for lenses, then I guess why the hell not charge $1060 for lenses. The customer (with insurance) certainly doesn't care. Other than this hypothetical I'm just baffled as to how that place ever sells a pair of glasses.
We are constantly put in the awkward and untenable position of being told we are responsible for things we do not actually have the power to fix – that *we* must save our small businesses, but at the same time being confronted with an economic reality that compels us to seek out low prices. You're a bad person if you shop online rather than at your local stores, but finding a way to make ends meet keeps getting harder. I don't *have* $1100 to spend on anything right now, let alone plastic lenses I can get for 1/3 or 1/4 the price.
I don't have any solutions here, only that helpless feeling of consuming in a way I am well aware is bad but not being able to afford the alternative of doing it the good way. I don't blame this one optometrist's office for the economics of healthcare or vision care in the United States, and no part of me wants to see them suffer. At the same time, the Please Buy Local principle has to be priced at a level people can actually afford.