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 researching how much glasses cost to make, and I found out that the answer is no! There are literally many 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 you know. For example, Luxottica owns the Lenscrafters store brand and 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, leave, 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 always have to wear the same glasses no matter what, so I bought myself three pairs of Payne Glasses in three different colors to mix and match with more of my clothes.