SmartMoney Journal on Finding Low-priced Value Prescription Glasses Online

"FOR YEARS I'VE BEEN wondering why eyeglasses cost so much. Even at LensCrafters, which is to eyewear what Gap is to clothes, you can easily pay $500 for a few pieces of plastic and screws. The last instant I went in, I tried on a $250 pair of retro-librarian eyeglasses that made me appear real smart. So smart that I asked the sales guy why they cost so much. He gave me a funny look. "They're chic," he huffed. That did it. With a little digging, I found online USA eyewear shops providing a much cheaper choice. Seven years ago a New York City optician sold his three Manhattan retail locations to start a cheaper-eyeglasses dot com, one of the budding quantity of mark down-eye glasses Web sites. By typing in your prescription and dimensions, you can order a decent set of eyeglasses off his website for as little as $28. His secret: He built a lab in the suburban outer edge of Brooklyn. His two Ukrainian assistants, Vladimir and Alex, grind 20 to 50 pairs of eyeglasses a day under the fluorescent lights, via the equivalent equipment you'd find in the back of an optician's store. Alex is moonlighting from his work making lenses for - you guessed it - LensCrafters.

Of course, the first thing I ask is why eye wear cost hundreds of dollars at the representative eyewear shop. "I used to order frames for $20 and sell them for $200," he recalls. He actually starts laughing. "Yup. It's mad!"

This established my most awful worries. Sure, you expect merchants to price something above wholesale to make a return. A representative garments store might double its wholesale expenses to come up with a retail price, for example. But some eyewear stores mark up eye glasses as much as 1,000%. That maybe explains why bazillionaire Leonardo Del Vecchio, the guy who owns major chains such as LensCrafters, Sunglass Hut and Pearle Vision, ranks among the world's 50 richest men. "Del Vecchio is raking in the money!" says Appelbaum, sounding a tad jealous. "He has truckloads of it!"

As outrageous as these markups sound, your typical storefront optical store relies on them just to get by. According to Dublin-based research firm Research and Markets, most do less than $500,000 a year in sales, and like any retail operation, a big hunk of that goes to pay the rent and sales workforce. If eye glasses stores offer a gratis eye exam, the price of your eyeglasses is also footing the bill for the optometrist's $100,000 salary. And if they make your glasses while you wait, you're also paying for $500,000 in in-store lab equipment. When all's said and done, a typical optician makes a 15 to 20% profit on the average sale - about the same margin cheap online eye glasses stores enjoy.

LensCrafters, which declined to comment, perhaps doesn't have much to fear from online sellers. Web based eyeglasses stores offer such low prices and a 30-day guarantee since a large amount folks are still too fearful to buy eyeglasses on the web. Still, there may be a little movement going on. Eagan, Minn., blogger Ira Mitchell, whose musings about photography and electronics used to attract about 50 readers a day, recently posted an essay titled, "Eyeglass stores are for suckers." Within 24 hours, he says, more than 50,000 readers flocked to his blog to gripe about their own overpriced eye wear and confer the benefits of ordering on the internet.

Back at the LensCrafters store, I ask the sales man if I can get a concession. He says no, but offers to charge my purchase to a LensCrafters credit card. "You won't have to make any payments for the first three months!" he says. It slowly dawns on me: The glasses are so expensive they come with their own financing plan. Maybe it's time to take a $28 gamble with online eye wear as long as it is from a USA registered FDA optical lab! Because there are no certification nor governement safeguards in foreign markets like China, consumers should trust their vision to USA regulated FDA registered labs."

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