This is hands down the best experience I've ever had buying glasses: a great selection of frames at a reasonable price, fantastic service that was genuinely helpful, prompt arrival of the glasses.
This seems to me a minor miracle, since shopping for glasses falls on my list of favorite activities somewhere well below shoveling snow in Siberia with a teaspoon. The problem: without my glasses I cannot see, at all. So I have to make a decision about a stressful topic -- fashion -- on the basis of no information. It feels like a problem in quantum physics: you can either know what the glasses look like or how fast they are moving, but you cannot know what the glasses look like on you. I think Heisenberg said something about that when he was shopping for glasses.
But as a fashion-challenged geek seeking to look less like a fashioned-challenged geek, I felt it was time to say goodbye to my old glasses, which possibly predated Madonna. Also, I suddenly needed both distance-only glasses AND -- horrors -- trifocals. Fashionable ones. Emergency!
After giving up the search at a couple of other stores -- mostly out of exhaustion -- I tried See. It stood out immediately from the other stores for two reasons. First, the selection of frames was great: excellent choice of shapes and colors, and approaches to the eternal question of "how fashionable do you want to be?" ranging from subtly stylish to bleeding-edge out-there-on-the-rings-of-Saturn. Not a fashion dud in the bunch. My previous glasses had been chosen more than ten years before in a moment of despair over the whole process, and I was delighted to observe that not a single pair of glasses at See resembled them in any way.
Second, I got great help. The manager, Mike, helped me, and he struck the perfect balance between leaving me to browse independently, helping me find frames in my favorite shapes and colors, and offering opinions on what kind of frames would suit my face best. When I made it clear that these opinions would be welcome -- since I couldn't see -- he steered me away from the wider frames I initially selected and towards frames similar in color and style but a much better size for my face. He also didn't necessarily steer me towards the more expensive frames, and even found one pair that was fifty per cent off.
He never rushed me, leaving me to ponder when I wanted to and coming back to advise me when I asked. I'd brought a camera with me, and when I'd narrowed down the choices to the top three or four, Mike took my picture so I could get a better idea of what they looked like on.
When the time came to buy the frames, Mike was great, explaining the cost of each option up front, and calculating the cost of the trifocals twice: once for the sale frames and once for the frames that weren't on sale. I saved a significant amount of money by getting the trifocals on sale frames: the lenses and coatings also got a discount.
The result: two pairs of FABULOUS glasses! One of them arrived in only three days and the other, more complicated trifocal prescription in eight days. They both look fantastic -- so much so that my friends have at last felt free to explain to me how wretched my previous glasses were and how vast the improvement is. Initial reaction of a dear friend when I sent her a picture: "they're fantastic frames, but why are you sending me a picture of someone else in your new glasses?"
Later she claimed she was kidding. I claim that I believe her. On the glasses, at least, we genuinely agree. They look great. I love them almost as much as chocolate! (Well, almost.) And the process of buying them was incredibly easy. When the sad day comes that these glasses, too, must go to the Great Optician in the Sky, I'll happily go back to See. read more