Almost 80 percent of glasses are made and sold by one single company, giving them the power to artificially drive up prices by almost 2000%.
TruTV’s “Adam Ruins Everything,” points out that the whole industry of eyeglasses and sunglasses is completely rigged in favor of one mysterious company: Luxottica.
Huffingtonpost.com reports:
And this company controls pretty much the entire eyewear market, from the frames themselves to the stores where we buy our glasses, to even some of our health insurance.
Persol? Luxottica. Prada? Luxottica. Ray Bans, Ralph Lauren, Versace and Michael Kors? Luxottica makes glasses for them all.
Axford says this virtual monopoly gives Luxottica the “power to drive up the price of glasses for everybody, sometimes charging as much as 20 times what they cost to produce.”
So whereas Luxottica could technically just label everything “Luxottica,” they won’t, because Axford states: “What Luxottica is really selling you is the illusion of choice.”
May you see the world a little more clearly now.
