Is the lens grinding process more complicated or is there just too much variation in eyesight to make them feasible on a mass scale?
In: Other
ITT: Almost everyone is super incorrect.
In store reading glasses and prescription readers of the same correction values are basically the same thing. The differences are:
Prescription glasses may have higher quality materials for the frame or lens, or a wider set of style options. You typically have options for different lens thickness, coatings, and in some cases grinding methods, but those shouldn’t affect your actual vision.
Prescription glasses aren’t limited to 0.25 diopter increments, can include different values for the left and right eye, and can include more complex corrections for astigmatism. It would be too costly to stock every variant a patient could need, and people getting a prescription tend to get a much more exact (though typically still subjective) measurement of their vision.
With that said, if your prescription happens to be something your drug store offers, it would be effectively the same. Also, the idea that drug store readers “only magnify things” is kind of a silly thing to say, because prescription glasses for simple ~~nearsightedness~~ farsightedness or presbyopia do the exact same thing.
As a side note, if you don’t want to deal with the Luxottica racket, there are many online stores that will make you custom glasses for way less than your eye doctor or local store, including some options not much more than a pair of drug store readers. In the US, your eye doctor is required to provide you your prescription, unprompted, and you can have anyone make the lenses. Ask them for the “PD” (pupillary distance) as that is often not on the prescription, but easy for them to measure and give you.
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