Eyes and Ears Online

By Wayne Maruna

            Jeff Bezos is the founder and CEO of Amazon.com. He started the business in a garage in the mid-90s selling books online.  Even back then, his vision was to grow Amazon into “the everything store”.  He has succeeded to the point where his 17% share of Amazon stock has placed his estimated net worth at $76B as of 4/15/17.

            I think it’s safe to say that the vast majority of people with computers make online purchases: electronics, clothing, cleaning supplies, foodstuffs, gifts for delivery.  But are there things you would never consider buying online?  I think the answer depends on the individual.  I buy a lot of my clothes online, whereas my wife would never consider buying clothes she has not touched and tried on. On the other hand, she buys a fair amount of specialty foods online due to dietary restrictions and the wider range of choices found online.

            I have purchased maintenance medications online for years through drug plans I have participated in due to the ease of having 90 day supplies delivered right to the home.  But I think most people would hesitate to purchase medically related items that are associated with personal fittings or services.

            Take for example eyeglasses.  I would think that online eyeglass purchases would not be top-of-mind for most people, and the same would be true for hearing aids.  We are used to placing our trust in someone to assist us in taking a doctor’s prescription, be it for vision or hearing, and converting that into the appliance we will wear to improve sight and hearing.

            Until a year ago, I did not even know one could purchase prescription eye glasses online. But I was not truly satisfied with the glasses I was receiving through normal channels, so I got it in my head to look at alternatives.  Now I will grant you there are factors in my eye history that make me something of a difficult fit, and I’m not necessarily faulting local professionals I have used.  But I figured if I was going to be less than satisfied, perhaps I could do so at a lower cost.

            Complicating the process is the fact that glasses can be just as much a fashion statement as a vision aid.  I don’t ever see my wife getting glasses online.  She needs to see every frame in the county at least once before making a decision.  I can understand that to a point.  When you meet people, they are generally looking at your face while they talk to you, unless your name is Dolly Parton, and eye glasses really do frame your face.  But frames can also be ridiculously expensive, owing in part to the fact that there are a limited number of manufacturers who control the market.  An Italian company called Luxottica owns many of the big eyeglass outfitters. If you’ve purchased from LensCrafters, Pearle Vision Centers, Sunglass Hut, Sears Optical, or Target Optical, you’ve purchased from Luxottica.

            So a year ago, I decided to take a chance and order a pair of glasses online.  I ended up ordering from glassesusa.com, which is not to say they are the least expensive or the best. The process was simple.  I scanned my doctor’s prescription and emailed it to them.  I selected my frames from among the many they displayed on their website.  I had to determine my approximate frame size by looking at the sizes etched into my existing glasses, both for the temple length and the nose bridge width.  Perhaps the most concerning part was determining the distance between my pupils by looking in a mirror while holding up the millimeter side of a ruler.  All that information is entered into an online ordering form.  Add your credit card info, and the process starts.  If I had any gripe with glassesusa.com, it was that the process was slow, perhaps a couple of weeks.  But when they arrived, they worked and fit fine, at a cost just over half of what I had paid for my prior pair of progressive lens glasses.  In the last few weeks, I’ve gone back to their website to order a pair or reading glasses, since I had also received a reading-glasses-only Rx from my ophthalmologist. Having had Lasik and cataract surgeries in the past, I have what is called mono-vision, where one eye is corrected to see distance while the other works for close-up. Coupled with a high degree of astigmatism, regular retail reading glasses don’t work for me, since the correction factors from one eye to the other are so different.  This online purchase also turned out to be quite satisfactory and at what I felt was a bargain price.

            If you do a search for eyeglasses online, you will find many companies vying for your business.  A company called Warby Parker will even send you up to five frames on a free trial to test for yourself.