piteousgate:

mulattafury:

you wanna know something that’s just, a shameful capitalist hellscape??

fucking EYEGLASSES.

my eyeglass prescription has not changed in over 10 years so a.) i do not need an eye exam every year and b.) the way eye clinics treat you when you try to get a copy of your prescription (to which you are legally entitled if you live in the US) is anywhere on the scale from downright horrible to actually criminal

it seems to be universal that America’s Best is particularly awful about this. I buy from there once in a while because I haven’t found anywhere with a better price (yes, you really can get 2 complete pairs of single-vision eyeglasses + eye exam for $70 if you pick from their narrow selection of frames at that price point and don’t let them convince you that you have to upgrade your lenses or coating). when i asked for a copy of my prescription the associate checking me out told me they weren’t allowed to give it to me. when i told her that was an FTC violation she rolled her eyes and scrawled it sloppily on a scrap piece of receipt paper, to where it was completely illegible, and then wrote VOID all over it so it was unreadable. from reading online reviews, this seems to be how they handle it when people insist on a copy of their prescription. one review said they eventually allowed her to see the printout of her prescription, but wouldn’t hand it to her and would cover the relevant information with their hands. they refuse to give your PD, which you need to order properly fitting glasses online.

and every clinic will guilt-trip you for buying your glasses online, and imply that this is somehow detrimental to your health. like, glasses are an absolute necessity for so many people, how can you justify forcing someone to pay hundreds of dollars a pair when you can get them for ten bucks from a site like zennioptical

anyway, y’all, it’s against the law for an eye clinic to withhold your prescription, according to the FTC they’re actually required to GIVE you a copy whether you ask for it or not, but they will fuck you on your PD. I’ve heard of people getting their PD measured by saying they need it for a Google Cardboard or something, and the clinics are a lot more chill about it if they don’t think you’re using it to buy glasses elsewhere. but it still shouldn’t be such a goddamn ordeal to get your PERSONAL MEDICAL INFORMATION from A DOCTOR.

I suppose it’s worth mentioning here that when I worked at a discount eyeglass retailer that my boss let slip that the markup on a pair of glasses at our store ranged from 4000% to 10000%, and we were by far the cheapest place in the region selling the same product. The raw material purchased wholesale costs about a couple bucks per pair going up to $5-8 if there were a lot of coatings, and well, they certainly weren’t paying as much for our labor. In turn, they sold for as much as several hundred dollars. Working there gave me a visceral understanding of commodity fetishism.

And that’s not even getting into the Rx stuff that OP mentions. My store was generally pretty easygoing about making new copies of prescriptions but it was absolute hell getting perfectly valid, new prescriptions faxed over to us from the hospitals. The hoops they made you jump through to discourage people from purchasing elsewhere and to go back to the place they got their prescription, at even absurdly higher markup. It’s a completely faked industry from top to bottom.