This store is the closest thing to the optometrist I grew up with and saw from age 13 to 44. I used to put off my yearly appointment just to make sure I could go see her in San Francisco. I figured I had to go home anyway. I managed it while living in San Antonio, Geneva, and Beijing. She is a somewhat stern Cantonese woman - a 'spinster' in the dark-ages parlance of my youth - who owns her building on rollicking Stockton Street in Chinatown. My bill barely inched up for literally decades. When my then-boyfriend husband picked out a pair of $400 Donna Karan for me elsewhere (this was pre-2000 Internet bust dollars, mind you), didn't hear a peep out of her staff. They fitted those beauties with as much alacrity as if they had made the commission. (Hubby looked over what felt like 400 pairs of glasses over two days in the immense sprawl of Taiwanese malls ranging over Arcadia and Monterey Park down south...figure this is as good a place as any to give him his due.)
She retired a few years ago. I finagled a couple more appointments just because my mom and he sister are friends, then doc set her foot down. I ran smack into franchises after that. Everywhere I turn, optometrists and chains kept me waiting, snapped at me, and frowned thunderously when I bucked at hideously expensive purchases (funny how the older I get the less worthwhile they seem.) VSP is a marketing scheme bordering on scam.
I found Pioneer through the Chinese online directory for the DC area. Mom-and-pop, very professional, speak Queen's English (one of the owners is from Hong Kong.) They don't take VSP, but I'm so done with it anyway. No pressure tactics.
I was supposed to pick up my glasses in late February this year. I was stupid enough to drive to Rockville through the back roads, after a snowstorm of sufficient scale to set the Capital Weather Gang comment section abuzz - still not used to the East Coast weather after eight years here. Daughter loudly predicted our demise several times with what looked like prescience as I wove through one-lane death traps. But the Pioneer people, despite uncertain deliveries, got the glasses ready for me on time. To top it off, DH and I ate nightmarket comfort food at Taipei Taste next door. We Chinese consider snow's desolate beauty purifying for the soul when there is hot grass jelly with Tahiti pearls simmered in brown sugar close at hand. And it helps to be able to tell your taro apart from the rest of it. read more