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The Spectacle Blog
My favorite pair of glasses has a scratched lens (despite the much vaunted “no-scratch” coating). So, I went to Lenscrafters to get the lens replaced. They asked me when I got the prescription. It turns out it was a little over a year ago. “I’m sorry,” the woman at Lenscrafters tells me, “but we cannot replace the lens because your prescription has expired.”
Let’s review the situation. I have a scratched lens in a pair of glasses which are working very well for me. I can see perfectly clearly with the current prescription which is now just a little over a year old. State law prohibits Lenscrafters from replacing the lens. It is apparently ILLEGAL to replace a lens with a prescription older than 12 months.
Now, who benefits from a law of this type? Is it the consumer? No. Is it Lenscrafters? Not necessarily. They lost the opportunity to charge me for a replacement lens, though they may do better from me having to buy new glasses. But the biggest beneficiary is optometrists. Thanks to the law causing prescriptions to LEGALLY expire, I MUST go to an optometrist to solve my problem. Through legal (and therefore coercive) means, the optometrists have made themselves necessary gatekeepers to me resolving my personal vision issues even though I already have a prescription that works well.
Law is supposed to be made for the common good. But what we miss is that the government is an excellent instrument for profit seeking through regulation. If you make the government too big and too important, a variety of interests will go to the government to find a way to make their money instead of making it through customer service, innovation, etc..
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More Blog Posts by Hunter Baker
http://spectator.org/blog/2010/12/21/an-everyday-example-of-why-big
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MikeN| 12.21.10 @ 11:10AM
It used to be that LensCrafters would do the measurements in the store for free, they never said anything about a prescription. Is this a federal law?
Stan Redmond| 12.21.10 @ 11:43AM
EVERY aspect of your life belongs to the government. There are no private property laws, no privacy (unless you're aborting babies), and no liberty anymore. One day, I woke up as usual, and went about my business. A knock on the door revealed a Sheriff and a representative from the city I lived in at the time. Lucky for me a bureaucrat put his finger on a map and stated my property, and my neighbors', are better used as a park because we were in a lovely area near the river that ran through town. That's an extreme example but go try to buy cold medicine now. YOU CAN'T. Want to buy a gun in certain states? Good luck.
Something as simple as your glasses, something that has ZERO effect on your health and requires no special skills to know if they work or not is controlled and owned by some busy body.
elliesue| 12.21.10 @ 12:20PM
I AGREE!! I was in Costco to take advantage of a sale 3 days BEFORE my perscription expired, and they refused the sale because it was for 4 boxes of lenses. By law they could sell me only 1 box (at full price) but not 4 at the sale price. Again, this was before my perscription expired. These coercive, special interest laws must change.
PattyMor| 12.21.10 @ 12:32PM
We no longer have a free and open society and
capitalism. We have devolved into Fascism. The blending of business with government. So you get rules that benefit one segment at the expense of the rest of us.