Dawn of the Geeks

Fairness to Contact Lens Consumers Act

I was with my girlfriend at Lenscrafters trying to sort out her prescription. They were trying to charge her $80 for a year of contacts so I told her to just get the prescription and then check prices elsewhere. Turns out they prescribed her Proclear. They claimed it was the law that they put on a brand on the prescription. I disagreed with that and when I got home I looked it up. Turns out that a brand must be on the prescription but congress is looking into how that affects consumers. Hmmm…. forcing a brand on consumers, I wonder how that could possibly be a negative. So now she’s forced to buy only Lenscrafters brand lenses. It’s probably one of the most idiotic things I’ve ever heard of. Lenscrafters peddles this lie that contacts are somehow custom made per person per prescription and it’s somehow dangerous to go with alternate brands for your prescription. When they told me that I promptly got my prescription elsewhere.

For those who don’t know, contacts are mass produced. Where I go and most places have boxes and boxes of contacts all ready to go for their customers. The only form of vision correction not mass produced are glasses. Those are custom made per customer. Lasik is also obviously custom performed per customer. No two eyes are alike. But that’s what makes contacts so cheap, the variation in eyes isn’t significant enough to warrent custom made contacts. They’re approximations based on two key parameters. If you notice, there are generally only two numbers on your prescription per eye and maybe the diameter which actually doesn’t matter. The diameter is purely a comfort issue. Nationwide Vision locked me into an expensive brand of contacts using the diameter. Fortunatly I found another company that was kind enough to change the diameter free of charge and sell me a much cheaper contact which turned out to be far superior to the crap that Nationwide was peddling.

Coincidently I found out that Proclear is a brand of Coopervision which is what Nationwide pushed on me.

So word of warning, before you pay money to some eye care provider to get a prescription, ask them what brand of contacts they intend to push on you. Then do research. Or simply demand a brand before the prescription is filled. If they won’t give you Acuvue or whatever you want, go somewhere else.