How come you can buy reading glasses for a few bucks at pharmacies or Wal-Mart, but they don’t make them for being able to see farther away?

Question

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

Answer 1

As you age, your eyes tend to be less flexible and less able to focus on things closer to you. Reading glasses are typically used by middle aged people whos eyes are showing this degradation.

Short-sightedness, or the ability to focus on close items but not far, is not related to aging and is likely to need correction at a younger age.

Older people need to tweak their vision to help them read. Younger people with vision issues are more likely to need a more accurate correction and they are far better off getting their eyes properly tested and ensuring that not only is the spherical correction correct for each eye, but the cylindrical (astigmatism) correction is also appropriate.

I suspect that is dollar stores wanted to sell glasses for distance vision, they would be considered medical devices and would require a lot more regulation than for reading glasses.