5 Sunglasses Brands ROBBING You Blind (And 5 Worth Every Dollar)

Luxottica was founded in nineteen sixty one by Leonardo Del Vecchio in the small town of Agordo. Del Vecchio started making eyeglass components, then complete frames, then decided that manufacturing alone was not enough. He wanted to own every stage of the pipeline from the factory floor to the cash register. And over five decades, that is exactly what he built. Luxottica acquired the brands. Ray-Ban from Bausch and Lomb. Oakley after a hostile pricing war. Persol. Oliver Peoples. Vogue Eyewear. They signed licensing deals with Prada, Versace, Chanel, Dolce and Gabbana, Burberry, Ralph Lauren, Tiffany, Giorgio Armani, and dozens more. Then they bought the stores. Sunglass Hut, the largest sunglass retail chain in the world. LensCrafters, the largest optical retail chain in the United States. Pearle Vision. They took over the optical departments inside Target and Sears. And in a move that closed the last gap in the loop, they bought into EyeMed, one of the largest vision insurance providers in the country. So when you walk into a store owned by Luxottica, pick up glasses designed and manufactured by Luxottica, and hand over a co-pay processed through insurance partly managed by Luxottica, nobody in that chain has any incentive to lower the price. The company sets the cost at every single level. A CBS Sixty Minutes investigation examined this structure directly. The average pair of frames and lenses at LensCrafters costs roughly three hundred dollars. A reporter asked the LensCrafters executive whether customers get any kind of discount since the retail chain and the manufacturer are the same company. The answer was no. A Columbia University professor reviewing the industry's profit margins described them as relatively obscene, comparable only to the pharmaceutical drug industry.