I used to go to the eyeglass store and pay a fortune for a pair of glasses and come out furious at the price. Last year I spent $250 on a thin framed pair with no addon features. Just the frame and the lenses. And as I was walking to my car I thought to myself “there’s no way this cost even $100 to make, and even then I’m paying more than double!”. I went home and started doing research on how much glasses cost to make and I found out that the answer is no! There are literally a bunch of companies selling glasses with the same features and designs for $40 or less, like Payne Glasses, which outfitted me with a really nice $40 progressive blue blockers pair. I got the pair and the blue light filtering that would have otherwise cost me a small fortune at one of the bigger companies for what seemed to me like next to nothing!

How Is That Possible?

Let me tell you how this is all possible. A small handful of big companies like Luxottica, Safilo, Fielmann, Rodenstock, De Rigo, Eschenbach, Grand vision and a few others control more than 40% of the eyeglass market. In case you never heard of them, that’s because these are the parent companies of the brands that you know. For example Luxottica owns the Lenscrafters store brand, as well as individual eyeglass brands like Armani, Brooks Brothers and Chanel. Obviously not just those three. But do you know what that means? It means that for most people, whenever you go to buy glasses, it hardly matters which store you go to because statistically speaking, they are all owned by the same company. You go to one store, you don’t like the price, you leave, you go to another store and the price is the same. And you end up paying because you don’t have the time to hop from store to store and talk to each clerk every time!

That’s All In The Past Though, For Me At Least

So I fancy myself a fashionable person. At the very least I make some effort to look good. I was tired of this idea that we have to always wear the same glasses no matter what so I went and bought myself three pairs of Payne Glasses in three different colors that I can mix and match with more of my clothes.