Keep an eye on your glasses

I spent hours and hours in New York looking for specs that didn't cost a fortune and looked okay. I found some I liked well enough in the end, after hitting Costco and Lens Crafters and every chain and mom and pop shop between Brooklyn and West Orange. I felt like I'd gotten a relative steal even as I dipped into savings to pay for them and marked my calendar to come pick them up at the end of the week. I thought if they cost that much at home, they'd be an unattainable luxury in Japan.

Wrong again, champ.

There are huge discount glasses shops all over the place - Megane Supa, Hatch, and Dahlia (all owned by the same company) are the flashiest, with aisles of huge glass tables covered in rows of colorful frames. Jim needed to replace a broken pair, so we headed for the subway to go to a shop that we had seen. We stumbled across another branch of the same chain before we even reached the train.

He picked some frames he liked. The eye chart they asked him to use was the Landolt C, with open circles facing different directions. (The chart also had pairs of fish on it, and in the time I've been looking for an image of this I could have walked to the store and taken a photo and come back.)

His glasses were ready by the time we were done shopping at the 100 yen store across the street. They cost about as much as I paid just for the "protective coating" on my glasses. Are these the highest quality lenses? Maybe not. But they seem to be good enough.

This ad begs to differ (even though it's the same company that sells piles of cheapies). The left eye reminds the right eye that they'll go bad if they don't pay attention to their lens brand.