Glasses are officially IN! I don’t think anyone would disagree with that point. Frame styles from yesteryear are mounting huge comebacks (kind of like those golf shirts with the little crocodiles on them). Fortunately, the lens optics of yesteryear are history.….……or maybe not.….……
Prescription glasses are heavily advertised at extremely cheap prices on TV, the internet, and on billboards. There are, to my knowledge, two possible ways for this to work. Number one: bait-and-switch. Number two: antiquated optics behind the lenses. As our understanding of optics gets better and better, lenses utilizing older optical manufacturing techniques get pushed off to Asia and sold to the Western World for cheap. They are then placed into newer frames and marked up accordingly. “2013” lenses are made with wavefront guided techniques pioneered by some of the brightest PhD’s on the planet. They can conceivably correct for higher order visual aberrations we don’t even fully understand how to test for! Truly, it’s an exciting time to be in glasses! The pragmatic truth behind the drive for lenses with superior optics is the market: the Baby Boomers all need multifocal lenses to meet their needs for increased ranges of clear vision. Older people aren’t just reading and watching TV. They’re staying in the workforce longer and sitting in front of computers, and we are able to better meet their needs with lenses made through the use of contemporary optics — get what you pay for.
Being in business for ourselves affords us the ability to call all of our own shots, and one of those shots was a promise we made a long time ago: staying current — always. We choose not to bait-and-switch, and we refuse to make use of antiquated optics with our lenses. We demand the best for our patients and choose our products accordingly. We do not go back in time with our lens optics to push quantity and turnover. People already have enough options for that game without us joining in. Instead, we focus on quality and the individual needs of each patient, one at a time. Put simply, if we were in the phone industry, we would choose to carry iPhones and not bag phones (remember those?).