If someone walked up to you today and told you that you could buy a brand new 2010 Chevy Silverado for a mere $1499 you wouldn’t believe such nonsense. Hundreds of warning lights would be going off in your head telling you it’s a scam, the car’s stolen or defective, there is something just not right going on here. Even if you were to humor such a notion, you would check everything. You wouldn’t be satisfied until you knew the ulterior motive behind such a deal, because you, me, and everyone else in the civilized world have been ingrained with the knowledge that when something is too good to be true, it usually is.
There is always a catch. Altruism and generosity are an anomaly, not the norm. People are by nature selfish and self-centered, and corporations are nothing but a collection of such people. I’m not saying selfishness is a bad thing, nor am I talking about absolute selfishness to the detriment of others, but for a person or company to show generosity that comes at a steep cost to themselves is more rare than a full set of teeth at a redneck wedding. Specifically dealing with the business world, generosity is tantamount to bankruptcy. Companies need to pay their staff, purchase materials for manufacturing or sale, and show significant profits for their investors in order to remain in business. For a company to sell something at a loss, with no ulterior purpose to doing so, is unheard of.
So how can a company, any company, do what GreatEyeglasses.com claims to do?
I heard about this site through the radio, on my daily commute to work. Their pitch, designer brand glasses (frame and lens) for as low as $14.99 a pair. As anyone who wears glasses would know, even a “cheap” pair of glasses runs around the hundred-dollar mark, for that price we are talking fairly basic lenses and a decent quality frame. Any less than a hundred bucks, and you get the old coke-bottle glasses (think Bubbles from the Trailer Park Boys). Knowing that as a company, GreatEyeglasses.com has to be turning a profit or they wouldn’t be in business at all, how can they be selling prescription glasses at 15% of the standard market rates?
I looked into the site, the so-called deal, and it leaves me with the feeling that something crooked is going on. There were no designer frames as you would think of them. But what is a “Designer Brand”? If you design something, and put your company name on it, it is a designer brand product. A pair of dollar-store sun glasses can be called designer brand without lying, but they aren’t Ray Ban or Oakley by any means. It’s a null-term, meaningless except for its ability to sucker in idiots. All the products on their website were given a hokey product name, but there was no brand mention for any. If they had actual brands, they’d list them. They don’t, so that means what they are selling is house brand, and probably falls closer to the dollar-store product than they’d like to admit. But that’s not the worst of it…
Tell me, how do you know certified and accredited lens technicians are actually making these? How do you know it’s not some minimum wage high-school dropout running a mostly-automated machine? Truly, you can’t know for certain because there is no storefront, no service center that customers can visit. It’s factories and mail order, which means you have to take them on their word that they are even qualified to make prescription lenses. All you have is a radio advertisement and a website, and that’s not much to go on. At least with Lenscrafters you can see the technicians at work, making the lenses, testing the prescription strengths, fitting them to the frame. But with no store, you don’t know anything. How qualified are the staff? Is the product quality or crap? Do they even fucking fit? In fact, the most hilariously absurd thing is that in lieu of a proper store to try them on, what they do have is an online try-on system where you upload a photo of yourself and overlay the frame on the picture…
Are they fucking kidding us? That doesn’t tell you if they even fit, let alone if they are comfortable to wear. You would quite honestly be just as well-off using the South Park Studios Character Generator to figure it out. Same effect, which is zero.
So what is really being sold here? A lie, that’s for sure. The $14.99 pair of glasses will actually run you far more than just that. The site’s American, and pricing is in US Dollars (despite advertising on Canadian radio), which means exchange rates and customs fees, plus GST and/or PST charges when it arrives. Yes, there are frames/lens options as low as 14.99, but they also run as high as sixty bucks, and everything is extra. UV coating, extra. Thin or extra-thin lenses (instead of the stock coke-bottle size), extra. Tint, bi-focals, progressive lenses, all extra. Even shipping has to be added on top of the price, so when all is said and done, you aren’t getting them as cheap as advertised. It’s like selling that Silverado I mentioned before, but for the fifteen hundred bucks, you only get the frame, engine, and four wheels. If you want a steering column, suspension, a body, seats, or a windshield, expect the final price to be much closer to 35 grand.
Trying to recreate the glasses I have now through their site, with all the same features but using their inferior frames, ended up costing about $97 Canadian after exchange rates, tax, and shipping. That compared to the $120 I spent for an actual designer brand (Vogue). Yes, that’s a savings, but is it worth the risk? For my extra thirty-three bucks I was able to try them on, see how they fit, and am certain a qualified professional made them to-order. But with these web glasses, you gamble with your money, and there isn’t even a store to go bitch-out if it’s not as promised.
As they say, Caveat Emptor.
