I watched a meeting on CSPAN the other day between Saed Erakat and Aaron David Miller. (Following please find my research that watching this led to.) Please be patient and read all of this fully. Notice Scoop Jackson's relationship not only to JFK but to Richard Perle and the NeoConservatives.
JFK Library releases tapes (Scoop Jackson)
EXCERPT:
Audio files of these discussions are available to the media in mp3 format on request. They, and other historical resources related to the Nuclear Test Ban Treaty, may also be accessed on the Kennedy Library website at the following links:
- Audio of President Kennedy’s meeting with and Senators Mike Mansfield and Everett Dirksen, White House Tape 109, September 9, 1963
- Audio of President Kennedy’s meeting with Senator Henry “Scoop” Jackson, White House Tape 109, September 9, 1963
- Letter from President Kennedy to Senators Mike Mansfield and Everett Dirksen, September 10, 1963 (pdf)
- Additional resources on the Nuclear Test Ban Treaty
Israel's deceit
EXCERPT:
The Mother of all Scandals
EMAIL THIS PAGE TO A FRIEND
Once again, Israel has been caught with spies at the highest levels of the US Government.
1970 While working for Senator Henry “Scoop” Jackson, Richard Perle is caught by the FBI giving classified information to Israel. Nothing is done.
Henry 'Scoop' Jackson
EXCERPT:
As a Cold War anti-Communist Democrat, Jackson's political philosophies and positions have been cited as an influence on a number of key figures associated with neoconservatism, including Paul Wolfowitz and Richard Perle.[1] The Henry Jackson Society is named in his honor.
Scoop Jackson and 'His' republican friends
EXCERPT:
Ben Wattenberg: And then you ended up with Scoop Jackson? How did that happen? Senator Jackson, my hero, your hero, our hero, who really embodied hawkishness?
Richard Perle: In a good cause always.
Ben Wattenberg: Right.
Richard Perle: It was a complete accident although it traces back. Albert Wohlstetter phoned me one day. I was still a graduate student at Princeton doing some research in Cambridge, Massachusetts, and he said, could you come to Washington for a few days and interview some people and draft a report on the current debate shaping up in the Senate over ballistic missile defense, which was a hot issue in the Nineteen Sixty-nine debate. This was in Nineteen Sixty-nine. And he said, I’ve asked somebody else to do this too, and maybe the two of you could work together. The someone else was Paul Wolfowitz. So Paul and I came to Washington as volunteers for a few days, to interview people, and one of the people we interviewed was Scoop Jackson and it was love at first sight. I will never forget that first encounter with Scoop. Here we were a couple of graduate students, sitting on the floor in Scoop’s office in the Senate, reviewing charts and analyses of the ballistic missile defense and getting his views on the subject. Before I went back up to Cambridge, Scoop said, you know, you’re never…
Ben Wattenberg: To Cambridge or to Princeton?
PNAC and Scoop Jackson
EXCERPT:
After graduating college and a short stint in working for the fiercely anti-Communist Sen. Henry "Scoop" Jackson he went to work for a private military-consulting firm.
The following year he was appointed Assistant Secretary of Defense in the presidential administration of Ronald Reagan. During the presidential campaign of George W. Bush, Perle served as a foreign policy advisor.
Jackso-Vanik amendment wikipedia
EXCERPT:
The amendment denies most favored nation status to certain countries with non-market economies that restrict emigration, which is considered a human right. Permanent normal trade relations can be extended to a country subject to the law only if the President determines that it complies with the freedom of emigration requirements of the amendment. However, the President has the authority to grant a yearly waiver to the provisions of Jackson-Vanik, and these waivers were granted to the People's Republic of China starting in the late 1970s and later to Vietnam.
[edit] Background
Exit USSR visa of the type 2. For those who received permission to leave the USSR forever and lost Soviet citizenship. Not all who wanted were able to receive this kind of exit visaIn 1972 as the Cold War and the ongoing Arab–Israeli conflict were intensifying, the Brezhnev government imposed the so-called "diploma tax" on would-be emigrants who received a higher education in the USSR. While the professed justification for this tax was to repay state expenses for public education, this measure was designed to combat the brain drain caused by the growing emigration of Soviet Jews and other members of the intelligentsia to the West.
This development caused international protests. Twenty-one United States Nobel Laureates issued a public statement condemning it as a "massive violation of human rights." The Kremlin soon revoked the tax but imposed additional limitations, effectively choking off emigration, even for family reunification. A case could languish for years in the OVIR (ОВиР) department of the MVD. An often-cited but rarely explained official ground for the refusal to issue an emigration visa were "national security reasons."
[edit] Effects
At first the Jackson-Vanik amendment did little to help free Soviet Jewry. The number of exit visas declined after the passing of the amendment, as the USSR felt the external pressure was harming its credibility. However, in the late-1980s Mikhail Gorbachev agreed to comply with the protocols of the Organization for Security and Cooperation in Europe.
Since 1975 more than 500,000 refugees, many of whom were Jews, evangelical Christians, and Catholics from the former Soviet Union, have been resettled in the United States. An estimated one million Soviet Jews have immigrated to Israel in that time.
Jackson-Vanik also led to great changes within the Soviet Union. Other ethnic groups subsequently demanded the right to emigrate, and the ruling Communist Party had to face the fact that there was widespread dissatisfaction with its governance.
Former Soviet dissident Natan Sharansky wrote in his 2004 book The Case for Democracy:
RCSJ rescind Jackson-Vanick for Russia
EXCERPT:
NCSJ: Rescind Jackson-Vanik for Russia
April 29, 2010
WASHINGTON (JTA) -- A group that advocates for Jews in the former Soviet Union endorsed efforts to lift restrictions on Russia's trade with the United States.
Former Soviet states are still subject to review under standards established by the 1974 Jackson-Vanik amendment, which linked trade status to human rights, particularly among Jews. Jewish communities in those nations in recent years have lobbied for its rescission, and have garnered support in both parties.
"Russian Jewish life has flourished dramatically since the Soviet collapse in 1991," Mark Levin, who directs the NCSJ: Advocates on behalf of Jews in Russia, Ukraine, the Baltic States & Eurasia, told a joint hearing of the U.S. House of Representatives subcommittees on Europe and Trade on Tuesday. "What has happened is nothing less than a historic rebirth of a people and their culture after decades of persecution."
Also testifying on behalf of removing the restrictions was Mark Talisman, who heads the Project Judaica Foundation, which seeks to preserve Jewish culture. Talisman helped draft the amendment as chief of staff to the late U.S. Rep. Charles Vanik (D-Ohio), who shepherded the law through the House.
Resistance to removing the restrictions comes from some in the business and human rights communities who say that Russia continues to maintain centralized controls over business and religious expression.
Albert Wohlstetter
EXCERPT:
Wohlstetter and his wife, Roberta Morgan Wohlstetter, also counseled both Democratic and Republican administrations, including advisers to President John F. Kennedy during the Cuban missile crisis in 1962.[9] They received the Presidential Medal of Freedom from Ronald Reagan on November 7, 1985.
During his long career, Wohlstetter also taught at UCLA and the University of California, Berkeley, in the early 1960s. From 1964 to 1980, he taught in the political science department of the University of Chicago, and chaired the dissertation committees of Paul Wolfowitz and Zalmay Khalilzad. He is often credited with influencing a number of prominent members of the neoconservative movement,[10] including Richard Perle (who, as a teenager, dated Wohlstetter's daughter Joan).[11]
JFK names Scoop Jackson to head DNC
Flashback Friday: On This Day In 1960, JFK Names Scoop Jackson To Head DNC
July 16, 2010
July 16, 1960:
No Veep for Scoop, but he did get to chair the DNC.
One day after beginning his campaign as his party's presidential nominee, Sen. John Kennedy (D-Mass.) names his longtime friend, Sen. Henry "Scoop" Jackson of Washington, as chairman of the Democratic National Committee.
Jackson agrees to serve only until January 1961.
First elected to the Senate in 1952 — the same year as Kennedy — Jackson had been under consideration as JFK's running mate, a selection that ultimately went to Sen. Lyndon Johnson of Texas.
Also on this day, Kennedy announces that his brother, Robert, will be his campaign manager.
Saeb Erekat wikipedia
EXCERPT:
Politics
In 1991, Erekat was deputy head of the Palestinian delegation to the Madrid Conference and the subsequent follow-up talks in Washington between 1992 and 1993. Later, in 1994, he was appointed the Minister for Local Government for the Palestinian Authority and also the Chairman of the Palestinian negotiation delegation[1]. In 1995, Erekat served as Chief Negotiator for the Palestinians during the Oslo period. He was then elected to the Palestinian Legislative Council in 1996, representing Jericho.[1] As a politician, Erekat was considered to be a Yasser Arafat loyalist. including the Camp David meetings in 2000 and the negotiations at Taba in 2001. Erekat was also, along with Arafat and Faisal Husseini, one of the three high-ranking Palestinians who asked Ariel Sharon not to visit the Al-Aqsa Mosque in September 2000[7], an event which allegedly sparked off the Second Intifada.He also acted as Yasser Arafat's English interpreter. When Mahmoud Abbas was nominated to serve as Prime Minister of the Palestinian Legislative Council in early 2003, Erekat was slated to be Minister of Negotiations in the new cabinet, but he soon resigned after he was excluded from a delegation to meet with Israeli Prime Minister Ariel Sharon. This was interpreted as part of an internal Palestinian power struggle between Abbas and Arafat.[6][8] Erekat was later reappointed to his post and participated in the 2007 Annapolis Conference, where he took over from Ahmed Qureia during an impasse and helped hammer out a joint declaration.[9]
Erekat is one of the more prominent Palestinian spokespeople in the Western media.[10] Erekat has characterized the IDF's 2002 assault in the Palestinian town of Jenin as a "massacre" and a "war crime", charges that the IDF has denied.[11]
In April 2008, Erakat visited the Palestine Center in Washington DC and gave a lecture entitled "Five Months after Annapolis: Where Are We Headed?" Read the transcript online: [1]
Aaron David Miller wikipedia
EXCERPT:
In June 1993, Miller was appointed as the Deputy Special Middle East Coordinator[4] [5] in an office headed by Dennis Ross and charged by President Clinton with managing the Arab-Israeli negotiations. For the next seven years, Miller worked as part of a small interagency team where he helped structure the U.S. role in Arab-Israeli negotiations through the historic Oslo process, multilateral Arab-Israeli economic summits, Israeli-Jordanian peace treaty, and final status negotiations between Israel and Syria and between Israel and the Palestinians at Camp David in July 2000. Miller continued work on the Arab-Israeli issues in the George W. Bush administration [6] where he served as the Senior Advisor on Arab-Israeli negotiations in the Bureau of Near Eastern Affairs to Secretary Colin Powell[7]. He resigned from the Department of State in January 2003 to become President of Seeds of Peace.[5]
In June 1993, Miller was appointed as the Deputy Special Middle East Coordinator[4] [5] in an office headed by Dennis Ross and charged by President Clinton with managing the Arab-Israeli negotiations. For the next seven years, Miller worked as part of a small interagency team where he helped structure the U.S. role in Arab-Israeli negotiations through the historic Oslo process, multilateral Arab-Israeli economic summits, Israeli-Jordanian peace treaty, and final status negotiations between Israel and Syria and between Israel and the Palestinians at Camp David in July 2000. Miller continued work on the Arab-Israeli issues in the George W. Bush administration [6] where he served as the Senior Advisor on Arab-Israeli negotiations in the Bureau of Near Eastern Affairs to Secretary Colin Powell[7]. He resigned from the Department of State in January 2003 to become President of Seeds of Peace.[5]
In June 1993, Miller was appointed as the Deputy Special Middle East Coordinator[4] [5] in an office headed by Dennis Ross and charged by President Clinton with managing the Arab-Israeli negotiations. For the next seven years, Miller worked as part of a small interagency team where he helped structure the U.S. role in Arab-Israeli negotiations through the historic Oslo process, multilateral Arab-Israeli economic summits, Israeli-Jordanian peace treaty, and final status negotiations between Israel and Syria and between Israel and the Palestinians at Camp David in July 2000. Miller continued work on the Arab-Israeli issues in the George W. Bush administration [6] where he served as the Senior Advisor on Arab-Israeli negotiations in the Bureau of Near Eastern Affairs to Secretary Colin Powell[7]. He resigned from the Department of State in January 2003 to become President of Seeds of Peace.[5]
Downey was born on 4/4/65 (to become in 3 years the day MLK was murdered)
Be very leary of wikipediia as the following site comes up when you go back in and do the clicking.
Robert Downey Jr. %22
Robert Downey Jr. wikipedia
EXCERPT:
In 2007, Downey was cast as the title character in the comic book adaptation Iron Man which premiered in the spring of 2008, making almost $100 million in the United States and Canada during its opening weekend. In addition to receiving commercial success, Downey's performance in the film received rave reviews. His other 2008 films include Charlie Bartlett and the Ben Stiller-directed Tropic Thunder, in which he portrayed an Australian method actor overly engrossed in his role as an African-American soldier. He received his second Oscar nomination for said film, in the category of Best Supporting Actor, which he lost to Heath Ledger. Next, he played the titular lead character in Guy Ritchie's adaptation of Sherlock Holmes, released Christmas 2009, for which Downey won a Golden Globe for Best Performance by an Actor in a Motion Picture – Musical or Comedy for his portrayal of the famous detective.[1] He reprised the role of Tony Stark in the 2010 sequel, Iron Man 2, and then will again in 2012 in The Avengers.
Saturday, November 6, 2010
Monday, November 1, 2010
The eyewear industry is an incredible ripoff but there are alternatives
EXCERPT:
the Eyewear Industry Is an Incredible Ripoff, But There Are Alternatives
Tuesday,August 31, 2010
Wow — the Eyewear Industry Is an Incredible Ripoff, But There Are Alternatives
By Anneli Rufus, AlterNet
Posted on August 31, 2010, Printed on August 31, 2010
http://www.alternet.org/story/148024/
Those of us who need prescription eyewear need prescription eyewear. Are you wearing yours to read this? Imagine if you weren’t. Imagine life without your glasses for a year, a week, an hour. Yet many health insurance plans, especially for the unemployed or self-employed, don’t cover them.
Mine doesn’t.
Last year, I went shopping for no-line progressive bifocals in small oval metal frames. Name brands mean nothing to me. Price does. My high astigmatism and need for bifocals disqualify me from those buy-one-get-one-free deals, which almost always involve only single-vision specs.
In store after store, megachains and optical boutiques alike, small oval metal frames fitted with lenses matching my prescription started at $300. One popular shop quoted me $582 for the lenses alone.
I bought a pair of no-line progressive bifocals in small oval metal frames for $44 online. I’m wearing them right now.
Perhaps because prescription glasses are where medicine meets fashion, they’re among the world’s most overpriced merchandise. Imperfect eyesight isn’t your fault: You can’t make yourself nearsighted by eating too much fudge. Yet if your health plan excludes vision care, you’ve spent years at the mercy of a $64 billion industry characterized by 500-percent markups.
This has begun to change over the last few years. A knowledge-is-power, power-to-the-people, Web-driven DIY wave is rocking the optical industry’s very foundations. Dozens of companies now sell prescription glasses online, frames and lenses included, for as little as $7.95.
It works like this: Google “cheap glasses” to find a frame you like at a price you like at a site you like. (Among the most popular are 39DollarGlasses, ZenniOptical — where I bought mine — and Goggles4U.) Use the virtual fitting mechanism to “try it on.” Type in your prescription (obtained from an actual eye doctor), pupillary distance (aka PD, derived by measuring the space between your pupils with a ruler), address and payment information. Send.
It’s a virtual myopian/hyperopian/presbyopian Tea Party, led largely by Minnesota software engineer Ira Mitchell, who launched his revolutionary GlassyEyes blog (its motto is “Saving the World from Overpriced Glasses!”) in 2006. Packed with forums, product reviews, discount deals, and tips for buying specs online, it’s the vision-impaired version of Yelp.
“There is no appreciable functional or material difference” between prescription eyewear bought online and bought in brick-and-mortar stores, Mitchell tells me, but in stores “the cost to the consumer is anywhere from four to ten times more. It turns out that they’re making ridiculous margins on the frames, the lenses and the coatings.”
Complete with antiscratch coatings and other pluses, his own glasses cost between $30 and $60 per pair online. Over the last three years, he’s bought around 40 pair — because, at that price, he can.
Mitchell was appalled when he first began researching wholesale prices for optical merchandise and realized that opticians acquire lenses for as little as $3 each. “I’ve easily paid twenty times that when I didn’t know any better,” he says.
Granted, these glass, plastic, polycarbonate or polymer blanks must be ground to fit frames and prescriptions, and this takes work, but it’s not rocket science. Typically, lens grinding is done by optical laboratory technicians. According to PayScale.com, OLTs in the United States earn between $9.73 and $14.40 per hour. Most learn on the job, and have only a high-school diploma or a GED. No specific certification is required.
The fleecing, Mitchell says, is just as bad on frames.
“A consumer-level frame costs significantly less than $10 to manufacture. The rest is operations, licensing and profit. Think about that the next time you pick up an average $150 frame. These aren’t markedly different or superior to the $30 glasses available from reputable online dealers — and those include lenses, probably the same ones you were just about to pay $200 for in the store.”
A key to the industry-standard overpricing is the fact that a single corporation — Luxottica, the world’s largest eyewear firm — owns many retail eyewear chains and many popular eyewear brands. Based in Milan, Italy, Luxottica owns and operates LensCrafters, Sears Optical, Target Optical, Pearle Vision, Sunglass Hut, Ilori, and other chains in the United States, along with yet more chains throughout Asia, Europe, Africa, India, the Antipodes and the Middle East.
Luxottica owns Ray-Ban, Oakley, Oliver Peoples, Vogue, and other brands, and makes glasses under license for over a dozen designer labels including Versace, Prada, Bulgari, DKNY, Burberry, Ralph Lauren, Dolce & Gabbana, Donna Karan, Tiffany, and more. As if that isn’t enough, Luxottica is also the parent company of a vision-care benefits program, EyeMed.
Eyewear prices in brick-and-mortar stores stay artificially high, Mitchell says, due to “the lack of real competition, inasmuch as Luxottica owns massive manufacturing, licensing, retailing and insurance interests” — albeit EyeMed is “not so much insurance as a marketing ploy to get people to buy from their stores at a discount and to force the remaining independent stores to buy Luxottica controlled frames. But, again, most people are unaware of this.”
Because one company holds a near-monopoly on brick-and-mortar eyewear stores, “pricing models are somewhat static across the lot of them. They also have a knack for using the mattress sale model … constantly running sales that seem too good to pass up when in reality they’re still making enormous profits.”
“Semi-Annual 50% Off Sales Event,” reads a current LensCrafters ad. But the frames in question range from around $100 to around $300, and that’s without lenses.
“People pay what the brick-and-mortars are asking, primarily because the vast majority don’t know there are better, cheaper options,” Mitchell says.
As with any purchase — in fact more than with most purchases, as this involves eyesight — it pays to research each company’s delivery and return policies, Better Business Bureau status, and accessibility. Does its Web site list a phone number? If not, why not? If so, call it. Can you reach live people? Are they knowledgeable about your prescription? Does the company have its own in-house optometrists? It should. If you care about brand names, can you ascertain that the logo-bearing frames sold by any given company aren’t counterfeits? Factories churn out fakes.
While many online outfits sell real and bogus designer frames, the least expensive frames available online are unapologetically nameless generics: current and classic styles, sans logo. As is true with most consumer products, they’re not necessarily worse than their name-brand counterparts. After a year-plus of daily use, my $44 generics still look new. (That being said, I should have paid a few dollars more for higher-quality polycarbonate lenses and I should have sought bifocals with a wider middle-vision band, but these errors were my own, not the company’s.)
“Very high-priced frames may have somewhat better materials,” Mitchell says, “but from my experience, the no-names have been very well made.” Having owned dozens of generic pairs, he’s experienced “no more issues with them than with the name brands from LensCrafters. I think they’re pretty much on par.”
These days, he notes, “there are a lot more online retailers now than at the end of 2006. There aren’t a whole lot more reputable ones, however. I’ve shopped at over a dozen, and narrowed things down to about three or four that I feel comfortable recommending to others. As this is a fully custom market, mistakes can enter the process anywhere from the initial customer entering prescription information to the production process. I’ve found that a few of the sites do a better job than others at fixing mistakes. Some do better at this than the traditional stores.
“Prices haven’t dropped at all in the traditional brick-and-mortars, but downward price pressure from Wal-Mart will undoubtedly start to make an impact in certain parts of the country. I saw a sign in a
Wal-Mart recently for $38 glasses. The selection was tiny, but we’re starting to see a price intersection.”
The first online eyeglasses company was Houston-based FramesDirect. In 1992, optometrists Dhavid Cooper and Guy Hodgson closed their several Texas brick-and-mortar shops, then pondered their future.
“We knew that we wanted to sell eyewear in all fifty states 24 hours a day, seven days a week, 365 days a year,” Hodgson says. “We had no idea how to do this.” Renting a small office, they installed computers.
“When you talked about the Internet in those days, no one knew what you meant. Search engines were in their absolute infancy. We thought a 56k modem was blisteringly fast.”
Cooper had won a Surgeon General’s Commendation Award in his native South Africa for creating a program providing the poor with recycled glasses for free. Hodgson specialized in treating the nearly blind. Barely fluent in email, the pair created a basic Web site, offering designer glasses at low prices because, unlike brick-and-mortar opticians, they needed to pay neither storefront rent nor employees’ salaries, nor did they need to keep large quantities of merchandise in stock.
“Everyone around us thought we were completely mad: Eye doctors, giving up their lucrative practices to go into this weird thing,” Hodgson laughs. But once orders started pouring in, “The whole optical industry completely shunned us. They said we were ruining them.”
At eyewear conventions, he and Cooper wore their nametags backward to avoid verbal abuse. Since then, dozens of imitators have emerged, many based overseas and most able to offer even lower prices because they sell generics. Buying prescription eyewear is like buying prescription drugs: It’s cheaper online. It’s cheaper when it comes from outside the U.S. GlassesUnlimited, for instance, can afford to sell hundreds of different stylish frames fitted with prescription lenses for only $9.99 because its entire operation is based in Thailand.
“We don’t have big margins here. That’s how we are serving our clientele. That’s why we’re getting hundreds of orders on a daily basis, 70 percent of which come from the U.S. and Canada,” GU manager Sam Davis tells me. “We have virtually no expenses. We have our own home brand and do our own production. We don’t outsource anything.”
Based in the U.S., FramesDirect still undercuts retail-store prices for guaranteed designer goods.
“What we sell and what the brick-and-mortar stores sell are the exact same products,” Guy Hodgson says. “How can they afford to charge the prices they charge?”
EXCERPT:
the Eyewear Industry Is an Incredible Ripoff, But There Are Alternatives
Tuesday,August 31, 2010
Wow — the Eyewear Industry Is an Incredible Ripoff, But There Are Alternatives
By Anneli Rufus, AlterNet
Posted on August 31, 2010, Printed on August 31, 2010
http://www.alternet.org/story/148024/
Those of us who need prescription eyewear need prescription eyewear. Are you wearing yours to read this? Imagine if you weren’t. Imagine life without your glasses for a year, a week, an hour. Yet many health insurance plans, especially for the unemployed or self-employed, don’t cover them.
Mine doesn’t.
Last year, I went shopping for no-line progressive bifocals in small oval metal frames. Name brands mean nothing to me. Price does. My high astigmatism and need for bifocals disqualify me from those buy-one-get-one-free deals, which almost always involve only single-vision specs.
In store after store, megachains and optical boutiques alike, small oval metal frames fitted with lenses matching my prescription started at $300. One popular shop quoted me $582 for the lenses alone.
I bought a pair of no-line progressive bifocals in small oval metal frames for $44 online. I’m wearing them right now.
Perhaps because prescription glasses are where medicine meets fashion, they’re among the world’s most overpriced merchandise. Imperfect eyesight isn’t your fault: You can’t make yourself nearsighted by eating too much fudge. Yet if your health plan excludes vision care, you’ve spent years at the mercy of a $64 billion industry characterized by 500-percent markups.
This has begun to change over the last few years. A knowledge-is-power, power-to-the-people, Web-driven DIY wave is rocking the optical industry’s very foundations. Dozens of companies now sell prescription glasses online, frames and lenses included, for as little as $7.95.
It works like this: Google “cheap glasses” to find a frame you like at a price you like at a site you like. (Among the most popular are 39DollarGlasses, ZenniOptical — where I bought mine — and Goggles4U.) Use the virtual fitting mechanism to “try it on.” Type in your prescription (obtained from an actual eye doctor), pupillary distance (aka PD, derived by measuring the space between your pupils with a ruler), address and payment information. Send.
It’s a virtual myopian/hyperopian/presbyopian Tea Party, led largely by Minnesota software engineer Ira Mitchell, who launched his revolutionary GlassyEyes blog (its motto is “Saving the World from Overpriced Glasses!”) in 2006. Packed with forums, product reviews, discount deals, and tips for buying specs online, it’s the vision-impaired version of Yelp.
“There is no appreciable functional or material difference” between prescription eyewear bought online and bought in brick-and-mortar stores, Mitchell tells me, but in stores “the cost to the consumer is anywhere from four to ten times more. It turns out that they’re making ridiculous margins on the frames, the lenses and the coatings.”
Complete with antiscratch coatings and other pluses, his own glasses cost between $30 and $60 per pair online. Over the last three years, he’s bought around 40 pair — because, at that price, he can.
Mitchell was appalled when he first began researching wholesale prices for optical merchandise and realized that opticians acquire lenses for as little as $3 each. “I’ve easily paid twenty times that when I didn’t know any better,” he says.
Granted, these glass, plastic, polycarbonate or polymer blanks must be ground to fit frames and prescriptions, and this takes work, but it’s not rocket science. Typically, lens grinding is done by optical laboratory technicians. According to PayScale.com, OLTs in the United States earn between $9.73 and $14.40 per hour. Most learn on the job, and have only a high-school diploma or a GED. No specific certification is required.
The fleecing, Mitchell says, is just as bad on frames.
“A consumer-level frame costs significantly less than $10 to manufacture. The rest is operations, licensing and profit. Think about that the next time you pick up an average $150 frame. These aren’t markedly different or superior to the $30 glasses available from reputable online dealers — and those include lenses, probably the same ones you were just about to pay $200 for in the store.”
A key to the industry-standard overpricing is the fact that a single corporation — Luxottica, the world’s largest eyewear firm — owns many retail eyewear chains and many popular eyewear brands. Based in Milan, Italy, Luxottica owns and operates LensCrafters, Sears Optical, Target Optical, Pearle Vision, Sunglass Hut, Ilori, and other chains in the United States, along with yet more chains throughout Asia, Europe, Africa, India, the Antipodes and the Middle East.
Luxottica owns Ray-Ban, Oakley, Oliver Peoples, Vogue, and other brands, and makes glasses under license for over a dozen designer labels including Versace, Prada, Bulgari, DKNY, Burberry, Ralph Lauren, Dolce & Gabbana, Donna Karan, Tiffany, and more. As if that isn’t enough, Luxottica is also the parent company of a vision-care benefits program, EyeMed.
Eyewear prices in brick-and-mortar stores stay artificially high, Mitchell says, due to “the lack of real competition, inasmuch as Luxottica owns massive manufacturing, licensing, retailing and insurance interests” — albeit EyeMed is “not so much insurance as a marketing ploy to get people to buy from their stores at a discount and to force the remaining independent stores to buy Luxottica controlled frames. But, again, most people are unaware of this.”
Because one company holds a near-monopoly on brick-and-mortar eyewear stores, “pricing models are somewhat static across the lot of them. They also have a knack for using the mattress sale model … constantly running sales that seem too good to pass up when in reality they’re still making enormous profits.”
“Semi-Annual 50% Off Sales Event,” reads a current LensCrafters ad. But the frames in question range from around $100 to around $300, and that’s without lenses.
“People pay what the brick-and-mortars are asking, primarily because the vast majority don’t know there are better, cheaper options,” Mitchell says.
As with any purchase — in fact more than with most purchases, as this involves eyesight — it pays to research each company’s delivery and return policies, Better Business Bureau status, and accessibility. Does its Web site list a phone number? If not, why not? If so, call it. Can you reach live people? Are they knowledgeable about your prescription? Does the company have its own in-house optometrists? It should. If you care about brand names, can you ascertain that the logo-bearing frames sold by any given company aren’t counterfeits? Factories churn out fakes.
While many online outfits sell real and bogus designer frames, the least expensive frames available online are unapologetically nameless generics: current and classic styles, sans logo. As is true with most consumer products, they’re not necessarily worse than their name-brand counterparts. After a year-plus of daily use, my $44 generics still look new. (That being said, I should have paid a few dollars more for higher-quality polycarbonate lenses and I should have sought bifocals with a wider middle-vision band, but these errors were my own, not the company’s.)
“Very high-priced frames may have somewhat better materials,” Mitchell says, “but from my experience, the no-names have been very well made.” Having owned dozens of generic pairs, he’s experienced “no more issues with them than with the name brands from LensCrafters. I think they’re pretty much on par.”
These days, he notes, “there are a lot more online retailers now than at the end of 2006. There aren’t a whole lot more reputable ones, however. I’ve shopped at over a dozen, and narrowed things down to about three or four that I feel comfortable recommending to others. As this is a fully custom market, mistakes can enter the process anywhere from the initial customer entering prescription information to the production process. I’ve found that a few of the sites do a better job than others at fixing mistakes. Some do better at this than the traditional stores.
“Prices haven’t dropped at all in the traditional brick-and-mortars, but downward price pressure from Wal-Mart will undoubtedly start to make an impact in certain parts of the country. I saw a sign in a
Wal-Mart recently for $38 glasses. The selection was tiny, but we’re starting to see a price intersection.”
The first online eyeglasses company was Houston-based FramesDirect. In 1992, optometrists Dhavid Cooper and Guy Hodgson closed their several Texas brick-and-mortar shops, then pondered their future.
“We knew that we wanted to sell eyewear in all fifty states 24 hours a day, seven days a week, 365 days a year,” Hodgson says. “We had no idea how to do this.” Renting a small office, they installed computers.
“When you talked about the Internet in those days, no one knew what you meant. Search engines were in their absolute infancy. We thought a 56k modem was blisteringly fast.”
Cooper had won a Surgeon General’s Commendation Award in his native South Africa for creating a program providing the poor with recycled glasses for free. Hodgson specialized in treating the nearly blind. Barely fluent in email, the pair created a basic Web site, offering designer glasses at low prices because, unlike brick-and-mortar opticians, they needed to pay neither storefront rent nor employees’ salaries, nor did they need to keep large quantities of merchandise in stock.
“Everyone around us thought we were completely mad: Eye doctors, giving up their lucrative practices to go into this weird thing,” Hodgson laughs. But once orders started pouring in, “The whole optical industry completely shunned us. They said we were ruining them.”
At eyewear conventions, he and Cooper wore their nametags backward to avoid verbal abuse. Since then, dozens of imitators have emerged, many based overseas and most able to offer even lower prices because they sell generics. Buying prescription eyewear is like buying prescription drugs: It’s cheaper online. It’s cheaper when it comes from outside the U.S. GlassesUnlimited, for instance, can afford to sell hundreds of different stylish frames fitted with prescription lenses for only $9.99 because its entire operation is based in Thailand.
“We don’t have big margins here. That’s how we are serving our clientele. That’s why we’re getting hundreds of orders on a daily basis, 70 percent of which come from the U.S. and Canada,” GU manager Sam Davis tells me. “We have virtually no expenses. We have our own home brand and do our own production. We don’t outsource anything.”
Based in the U.S., FramesDirect still undercuts retail-store prices for guaranteed designer goods.
“What we sell and what the brick-and-mortar stores sell are the exact same products,” Guy Hodgson says. “How can they afford to charge the prices they charge?”
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