Prescription glasses are probably never going to go out of fashion and for the majority of long or short-sighted people, they will remain an absolute necessity. One of the biggest problems for people who wear glasses is the cost, as this could be anywhere from an affordable cost to a ‘bank-breaking’ sum. One of the reasons why spectacles tend to cost so much on the high street is that most optical stores have very large operating expenditures. This is down to a couple of things, the main one being that the opticians themselves are paid a very handsome annual salary. Now, imagine a high street multiple or even an independent practice running two clinics or more each day. The Optician’s annual salary alone could potentially run into thousands of pounds. The other main reason for expenditure is the fact that most practices, normally, have quite a few staff to pay in order to run the clinics efficiently. Most opticians stores will have at least one practice manager and a qualified dispensing optician to add-on top of the staff wage list. So you can start to see exactly why your prescription glasses can cost so much.
Now, let’s look at how most online prescription glasses retailers operate. For one, they don’t have to pay an optician’s salary, as most online retailers don’t need to operate with a qualified optician at the helm. Instead, they tend to only employ one or two qualified ‘dispensing opticians’, who only get paid a fraction of a qualified ophthalmologist wage. A good dispensing optician will be qualified enough in order to be able to check every pair of prescription glasses before they leave the lab and are shipped to the customer. The dispensing optician will usually have a team of lens technicians and advisors working underneath them and will supervise the day to day running of the business. In most cases, there will be a lab manager at the helm of the prescription glazing lab. The lab is where the lenses are surfaced and then fitted into the customer’s chosen frame. This is a very important and responsible position as they will have to ensure that every lens produced conforms to the European standards optical regulations. This means that every pair of prescription glasses that are made in the glazing lab are to specification and the prescription falls within the allowed tolerance.
When you place an order for prescription glasses it is then up to the online retailer to decide if your prescription lens should be taken from stock or should be made from scratch. In most instances, low prescription single vision lenses are kept in stock, whereas varifocal or bifocal lenses will have to be made from a ‘semi-finished’ lens blank. A semi-finished lens is where a base prescription has already been worked onto the front of the lens and all that is left for the lab to do is, work the rest of the prescription to the back of the lens in accordance with the customer’s specification. Once the lenses have been made and fitted into the chosen frame then the prescription glasses are usually passed over to the dispensing optician in order to verify that the prescription matches the required specification. So as you can see, online retailers don’t actually work that differently from most high street opticians. The only main difference is the price you pay online will generally be much lower than the high street multiples charge. But don’t just take my word for it, check it out yourself by comparing prices on the internet with your local high street store. You might just be surprised at how much you can potentially save when buying prescription glasses on the internet.
Jim Romand is a specialist prescription lens consultant and dispensing optician who has worked in the industry for over 25 years. After qualifying as an SMC Tech at the London college of optometry in 1985, He has since worked as a Lab consultant for many high street optician chains within the UK.
He currently works as a specialist optical lens technician for an online lens retailer specializing in prescription glasses