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Business & Tech

New Ratings: Twin Cities' Best Places To Buy Glasses, Contacts

Local nonprofit went shopping for eye wear and identified retailers that keep low prices and quality in focus.

Choosing the right retailer can save you money and hassle when shopping for glasses and contacts.
Choosing the right retailer can save you money and hassle when shopping for glasses and contacts. (Checkbook.org)

If you’re shopping for new specs, it’s easy to feel overwhelmed by all the choices of styles and brands. But much of this variety is an illusion: The lion’s share of eyeglasses on the market—including those sold under popular designer brand names—come from just a few Italian companies with names you probably won’t recognize: Luxottica, Marcolin, Safilo.

Luxottica not only manufactures millions of pairs of glasses annually, it also markets and sells them via more than 7,000 retail stores it also runs. Though the name “Luxottica” doesn’t show up on their signs, when you head into LensCrafters, Pearle Vision, Target’s optical department, Sunglass Hut, and many more outlets, you’re shopping at a space or store the behemoth owns or controls.

Plus, when you buy glasses from your favorite designer, they were probably made by one of the big three manufacturers. Luxottica owns several brands outright, including Ray-Ban and Persol. And other name-brand specs are created by the eyewear giants via licensing agreements, meaning those Coach, DKNY, or Michael Kors frames might all have been churned out in the same factory.

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With only a few companies controlling both the manufacture and the distribution of most of the frames sold, it’s tricky to figure out whether you’re getting a good deal or not. Luxottica frames can cost from about $300 to several thousand bucks per pair. It’s hard to justify paying a hefty price for a designer-labeled pair when you can buy a far less expensive model at Target that was made in the same facility and is basically the same thing as its designer counterpart.

The way to assess value is to buy from a store that offers great advice—where you’ll be told whether more expensive frames warrant their higher price tags or that you’d do just as well to buy a lesser-known brand. Many independent retailers stock a wide variety of frames. Some companies don’t sell any Luxottica products. For example, Warby Parker offers $95 single-lens glasses in funky, fashionable frames.

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To help you identify retailers that employ staff who can help you pick the right pair at the right price, the nonprofit Twin Cities Consumers’ Checkbook collected ratings from thousands of local consumers on vision centers and found big differences in quality. Several stores received “superior” ratings for overall service quality by at least 90 percent of their surveyed customers, while some others got such favorable ratings from fewer than 50 percent. In general, chains and franchise operations were rated lower than independent firms. But there was variation among each type of outlet.

Through special arrangement with Patch, you can access Checkbook’s ratings of local vision centers for quality and price free of charge until Oct. 10 by using this link: Checkbook.org/PatchTWN/Vision.

Checkbook’s undercover shoppers collected prices for 18 models of eyeglasses (with single-correction lenses) and found that some local outlets charge twice as much as others. For example, for a pair of Ray-Ban RX5286 eyeglasses, prices at surveyed stores ranged from $211 to $448. The best news: You don’t have to pay more to get great advice and service: Checkbook’s shoppers often found low prices at the highest rated stores.

Checkbook researchers also collected prices for six brands and models of contact lenses and found even larger store-to-store prices and fees. For example, for a one-year supply of 1-Day Acuvue Moist daily disposable lenses (plus exam and fitting), prices at local stores ranged from $573 to $995. Among local vision centers, Checkbook found Costco offered the cheapest prices for contacts, but there were also lower-than-average prices at some independent stores.

You can save a lot by buying from some—but not all—online-only retailers. Checkbook shopped for glasses and contacts at a sample of internet stores. For eyeglasses, prices at almost all the online retailers it shopped were substantially lower than surveyed local stores—several online stores offered prices that were less than half those offered by local outlets. Online sellers not only offered very low prices, but also carried a much wider selection of frames than any of the local outlets.

An obvious disadvantage of buying eyeglasses online is that, unless you’re replacing frames you like with an identical model, you can’t try on various frames to see how they’ll look on your face. Some sites let you upload a picture of yourself so you can try on frames virtually, but most shoppers will find it’s still far easier to compare options in-person in-store. Fortunately, liberal return policies are the norm among online sellers of eyeglasses, so you can return them easily if you’re not completely satisfied.

For contacts, Checkbook found that several online contact lens sellers offered prices that were at least 20 percent lower than the average prices at local stores, but some online sellers offered prices that were only a little bit better than the average prices offered by local outlets. The lowest prices were offered by FramesDirect.com and ContactLensKing.com, but even these two options offered higher prices than local price leader Costco.

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Twin Cities Consumers’ Checkbook magazine and Checkbook.org is a nonprofit organization with a mission to help consumers get the best service and lowest prices. We are supported by consumers and take no money from the service providers we evaluate. You can access all of Checkbook’s ratings of vision centers free of charge until Oct. 10 at www.checkbook.org/PatchTWN/Vision.

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