Coffee heat rising

Another Big Expense: Glasses

Well, after diddling away $700-plus on clothes a few weeks ago, I’ve done it again. This time, a like amount is going into the optometrist’s pocket. Over the weekend I ordered up two new pair of glasses. Actually, one new pair and a pair of lenses for an existing frame.

I’ve never been satisfied with the progressives and the up-close glasses Costco ground out for me last fall. They just don’t work for the tasks I do in my day-to-day life, which largely entail reading, an activity that apparently has fallen into such disuse that optometrists don’t understand that one or two of their customers still do it. And the truth is, I never intended to use those as my regular glasses, anyway—I bought them on the cheap to use as back-ups.

When we learned that the university would delay closing our office until December, I realized that the period between open enrollment and Canning Day would only be about three months. This made signing up for Avesis, the low-rent vision insurance program, highly cost-effective, since I would only have to make three payments to get the benefit of a year’s worth of coverage. It was only a few bucks a month. If I ran over to Costco, the only dispenser they covered that’s not excoriated in various online consumer reviews, I could try a new pair of progressives (which had never worked well for me in the past) and get a back-up pair for the up-close glasses at a deep discount. My plan was to continue using my old glasses, which at least more or less work, and stash these to use when the good glasses wore out or got lost.

Well, even though I can’t see to read more than a few words in them and they’re useless for computer work, I found myself using the progressives as distance lenses. They work OK to drive in, and I can read the list of ingredients on most (but not all) packaged foods in the grocery store. It’s easier to navigate Costco and Safeway with glasses that will allow me to see down the aisle, even if sometimes I have to take the glasses off to read what’s on a package.

However, they’re not very satisfactory. To read the music for choir, I had to take a pair of old, very strong prescription readers, clip a case to my music folder, and trade off the progressives for the readers whenever the print was smaller than about 12 points. Which is, we might add, most of the time. Some of the print on those scores is submicroscopic! This was a clumsy proposition from the outset. And though I could see the music with the readers on, I couldn’t see the choir director, who signals his desires not only with hand gestures but with various facial expressions. Through the readers, his face is a blur.

Add to that the fact that both the Avesis-underwritten pairs are plug-ugly. I’d selected the frames I thought were the least ugly at Costco, but their selection, despite being numerous, is actually pretty limited. These things are clunky and owl-like. They work at cross-purposes to my current scheme to start looking better.

Well, for quite some time I’ve known about this optician’s shop next to A.J.’s, my favorite overpriced gourmet grocery store. He has gorgeous frames, and he insists that he can do a better job than Costco ever dreamed. He claims he can make a pair of progressives that actually will allow me to read copy, and he does himself one better by proposing to make a pair of monovision intermediate glasses that will bring 8- to 10-point type into view and allow me to see the choir director well enough to follow what the man is trying to tell us.

So on Saturday, having bent the damn Silhouettes again sliding them in and out of the case I clipped to my choir folder (they warp at the drop of a hat), I dropped by his place to ask him to straighten them. This time I took my latest prescription, having already decided to replace the clunkers with a better-looking pair.

What I found there was a frame along the lines of the Silhouettes, but made of a stronger, bendier material. The temple pieces are attached to the lenses in a different way, so they’re less likely to snap off and less likely to crack the lenses. They’re almost invisible on your face, and they’re so lightweight it feels like you aren’t wearing glasses at all. And supposedly they don’t warp as easily as the Silhouettes; when they do, they’re allegedly easy enough to put back into shape that the consumer can do it herself.

So while the optician was measuring for this new device, he revealed the reason I can’t read through the Costco progressives without tilting my head back and peering down my nose. Though the prescription is right and the Costco optician’s measurements were correct, somewhere in the assembly-line manufacturing process they cut off the lower part of the close-up vision range. So in fact, there’s just not enough space on the lens to see a page of print. That’s why…not surprisingly…I can’t see a page of print. He said you should not have to tilt your head to see through the things—that you should be able to read by glancing down, not by doing contortions.

He suggested I take them back to Costco and ask them to redo them correctly. I pointed out that it’s been six months since I bought them, and he allowed as how after that long they probably wouldn’t do anything about it.

At any rate, he makes the lenses himself, at his shop, rather than shipping them to Indonesia or wherever these huge chains outsource to. This means the glasses will be ready the middle of next week instead of two or three weeks hence. And he does his own quality control.

So, we’ll see how this works. Of course, I don’t expect these new progressives to work for all the things I need to see. But I’ll be happy if they work a little better and don’t make me look like the owl-eyed Mma Makutsi in the Ladies No. 1 Detective Agency.

So…ahem! Where exactly is the money going to come from to cover seven hundred and some-odd dollars for a pair of freaking glasses? The frames alone were $390 (hey! I resisted buying the incredible $525 gilded pair with the ruby-colored Swarovski crystals), and then the progressive lenses were over $300, too.

Well, the truth is, even after paying for the clothing extravaganza, I still have enough in diddle-it-away savings to cover the cost. So when the bill comes I’ll probably just draw that down again. Even if there weren’t enough there to cover it, after having lived under budget for the entire spring semester, my $14,500 unemployment cushion has grown to something over $17,000. That overage was supposed to carry me through the summer, when, in the absence of teaching income, I’ll be living on nothing but Social Security, which covers only about half my base expenses. However, that extra $2,400 the college has decided to pay me for preparing the online course will moot the question of how I’m going to live through the summer. So, I figure there’s plenty to cover the glasses.

And in the justification department: one’s vision is not something to compromise on. Especially when dealing with it ties in so intimately with one’s vanity. La Maya once remarked, in justifying the wildly expensive pair of glasses she wears, that you have to wear the things on your face 16 or 18 hours a day. So if you have to have the things hanging on your nose all day long, you might as well break out of cheapskate mode and buy a decent pair.

Besides. Given the extravagant cost of Medicare B, Medicare D, and Medigap, this will easily push my 2010 medical costs high enough to make them deductible.

Repurcussions of the fall

Talking with people about the collapse of the economy, you gain some unexpected insights and hear stories you hadn’t thought about.

DCP_2671This afternoon I dropped by a pricey optical boutique in hopes that they could adjust my glasses frames and get them right. Background: Three or four years ago, I bought a pair of stupefyingly expensive Silhouette frames, mostly because my former best friend had a pair (yah, I know…monkey see, monkey do!). Their design really is neat. The lenses are completely rimless, not even any wire or nylon line around them, and the temple and nose pieces are so light and airy you hardly notice you have a pair of glasses perched on your schnozz. They have no hinges: the temple piece is made of a sproingy substance that can be folded, sort of, but springs back to its original shape.

Because they’re expensive, not every optical dispenser carries them. And because they’re kinda exotic, opticians who don’t sell them sometimes are a little flummoxed about repairs and adjustments to the frames. When they get bent, which can happen if you sit on them (ahem!), the repair job is not something for the happy handyperson—you end up having to take them to an optician who knows how to deal with them.

The other day, for no good reason, one of the temple pieces snapped off its lens. So I schlepped them downtown, not a hideously long drive but off my beaten path and so a bit of a nuisance. The woman who’s now running the place announced that the warranty had expired (say what? thôt they had a lifetime warranty!) and it would cost $85 to repair them. Exasperated, I ponied up the money to have her ship them back to the factory to be fixed, eight-five bucks being significantly less than the price of a new pair of the cheapest, ugliest glasses in the shop.

When I went to pick them up, she had me stick them on my face, took one look at me, said “that looks fine,” and out the door I went. No adjustment. Soon as I got home and glanced at myself in the bathroom mirror, I realized one lens was higher than the other. I looked like some sort of wacked-out comedienne…not exactly the image one likes to project when standing in front of 25 hypercritical students.

Hence the visit to the high-fashion optical boutique: it’s a lot closer to my house, and they dispense this variety of overpriced glasses.

The proprietor adjusted the frame so it sits straight on my nose, remarking (in passing) that the lenses had been drilled incorrectly and the temple pieces are too short for me.

This fall, before I’m canned, I’m going to need to buy a new pair of glasses. I’d planned to buy the cheapest junk I could get, just as a back-up.

“Well,” said he, “Before you buy something you won’t want to wear in public, take a look at these: I have a whole showcase full of frames marked way down. Four of my suppliers have gone out of business, and I need to move this stock.”

Hmmmm???

Indeed, the prices were marked down from stratospheric to about mid-level expensive. And some models were very, very handsome, obviously top of the line, with high-quality construction. Much nicer than the pair of glasses I was dragging around town to get adjusted correctly.

He said that the last part of 2008 and first part of 2009 were the worst period he’d ever been through, in twenty years as an optician. Not only was there no traffic through the store, but suppliers were collapsing all around him, some of them leaving him high and dry. “The outfit that made these,” he said, indicating a drawerful of jewelry-like frames, “stiffed me for $4,000!”

Over the past three months or so, however, things have been getting better. He said that right now his business is just about back to normal. People are starting to buy again, and he feels better about the prospects for the future.

Opticians pushed to the wall by the recession. Who would’ve thunk it? With so many people half-blind, aren’t glasses a necessity? On the other hand: it’s not surprising. Even low-end glasses are pricey, and “insurance” programs to help you buy the things are right up there with dental insurance: they don’t cover much. The industry has aggravated the problem by lobbying successfully for regulation forbidding you from buying a pair of glasses unless you’ve had a $70 eye exam in the past year. Add tax, and voilà! A $300 pair of glasses morphs into a $400 gouge. At Arizona’s 8.3 percent sales tax, even a cheaper $150 pair ends up costing you $240—and has to be replaced in a couple of years. Who has that kind of money laying around the house?

I wonder how many Americans are putting off glasses, dental care, and nonemergency medical care, feeling they can’t afford it? Are you delaying vision, dental, or health care because of the recession?