Luxottica: the illusion of choice and what you’re really getting when you spend hundreds of dollars on glasses.
This documentary was broadcast 13 years ago. Since then, Luxottica, the monopolistic Italian frames manufacturer, merged with Essilor, the largest ophthalmic lens manufacturer in the world. Today, EssilorLuxottica vertically controls 80% of the eyewear industry.
Here are more recent documentaries about EssilorLuxottica:
The documentaries aren’t only about designer brands. The excessive markup also concerns more mundane frames.
It is of course possible to find cheaper prescription glasses. The point is that EssilorLuxottica heavily impedes healthy competition in the entire eyewear industry, and you could be paying far less if the market was truly free.
I’ll tell you two anecdotes that illustrates this:
When I go to any of my local opticians to order lenses - all Luxottica outfits - I tell them I have my own frames and I’ll be doing the fitting myself. I don’t want their service: all I need them for is as a vehicle to order lenses, because I can’t order direct from Hoya. Each time, they charge me between $25 and $50 because I didn’t buy frames from them. And they do that because everybody else does that too, so they know I have no other alternatives.
I have a friend in Australia who regularly vacations in Indonesia, Malaysia, Taiwan, Hong Kong… and he told me that, for his simple prescription, he can get an eye exam, lenses for his correction cut and mounted onto frames in one hour for a few dollars, and each time he goes on vacation, he gets 4 or 5 pairs made because it’s so damn cheap. Why? Because it’s all stuff made in China and sold at normal markup.
Glasses are a solved problem, and a centuries-old technology. They should be a commodity. They have no reason to be sold at anywhere near the price they’re sold at.