Things that are just bafflingly expensive

i get mine from a vintage dude that sells beautiful fromes from the 1910s-1980s. they're cheaper than new frames from 2010.

my last pair of glasses were £10 from tesco

that was for frames, lenses and eye test

Yeah I'm like isanely short sighted plus an astigmatism, basically can't function without glasses on, I don't mess around with cheap glasses.

My last hernia operation was at Tesco. £30 flat for the diagnosis, anesthesia, operation - the works

tbf cozen's glasses are awesome, from what I remember of the wdyll thread

nah they're boggin but c'mon £10

Yeah I'm like isanely short sighted plus an astigmatism, basically can't function without glasses on,

Who told you this? An optician? THEY'RE ALL IN ON IT.

yup they peddle that 'not all frames are strong enough to take prescription lenses' line too

Really I am the same, and get a bit nervous if glasses are too cheap. Also like '2 pairs for 1' deals so I have a pair of glasses to help me find my glasses.

uhmm are you guys getting lenses made from diamond? plastic lenses are really light

mine are lead crystal

uhmm are you guys getting lenses made from diamond? plastic lenses are really light

I've only heard a variation on the not-strong-enough line a long while ago when they refused to put new lenses in my old NHS frames because it would somehow destroy them. Usually they just nudge/push/force bad-eye people towards thin or ultra-thin lenses, which aren't so cheap.

glassesdirect.co.uk << these guys are great.

glassesdirect.co.uk

Was going to mention them but have spent a week at work having to look at a a magazine with the founder's face on it & he has a punchable face.

http://www.moneytrendslatest.com/wp-content/JamieMurrayWells.jpg

The soundman thing was kind of a joke, you're right. I started out talking about the very basic kind of sound job that is not that big a deal, but then I slipped into a drunken "character" and the post doesn't make much sense. Not to be taken seriously, sorry.

Reading this now, will report back later.

Deluxe: How Luxury Lost Its Luster

I just dropped $350 US on new glasses, too - and that's after the discounts from my pretty good vision plan. The one pair would have been at least $600 US otherwise. Buying glasses is like buying a car. You've got the frames, the lenses, the extra charge for having a strong prescription or bi- or tri-focals, then the coatings and the polishings... It's all the little charges that they pile up that makes it so expensive. I did get fancy pants frames, so that added about $100 to the total, but still.

I've purchased glasses on line with great success (zennioptical.com), but I don't know. I really wanted a nice pair and I've got healthcare savings account funds to burn up so I went for it.

Oh and this eye doc even charges an extra $11 for the visual field acuity test, which is really annoying! Why isn't it part of the regular exam??? Glaucoma and attendant vision loss runs in my immediate family, too, so I can't really skip it.

dude what?? Jenny that seems totally exorbitant.. My vintage guy sold me a pair of ca. 1910 wire frames with coated lenses for £90 all in.

Oh I see you got an eye exam too? Did not know about an extra charge for strong prescriptions.. the same vintage guy (that I may be secretly in love with) also sold me some wraparound sunglasses made in Paris in 1975 and actually put wraparound prescription lenses in them, matching the original color of the plastic. It is pretty funky wearing prescription wraparounds, let me tell you. As I left the shop he was like "be careful the first couple of days you wear them" and I turned my head and was like "what?" and tripped over the doorway.

Oh but anyway yeah no extra charge for the wraparound/colored lenses. I just think these things can be done relatively inexpensively, they just aren't most of the time.

vanilla pods used to be this but i can get them in lidl now for 75c- last year it was €3.50 in tesco if i wanted the musky goodness.

i had some old frames and a prescription and still got quoted £150 or so to get shit made? this was a few years ago so maybe i am misremembering the specifics but it was easily enough to put me off.

(i have a weirdly felicitous prescription anyway so it's no biggie really - each eye is long and short sighted enough to balance each other out, if that makes any sense - but this will bode bad for the future i expect)

You know, Tracer, I'm trying to go over all the costs in my head and I think the bulk of that was the frames. I had copays for the exam and materials, and I paid out of pocket for anti-glare and scratch-proof coatings and I let them talk me into polishing the sides of the lenses, but my 'scrip is middle-of-the-road and single lens so there wasn't an extra charge for that. The copays run from $10 to $30. Sales tax accounts for 10% of the total.

Damn. Well, like I said, healthcare savings account funds to the rescue!

i know it's declasse and a crushing personal failure on my part to ask tracer who his frame dealer is but i'm gonna anyway.

Apple, Inc. (NASDAQ:AAPL) -- $226.05

Re: Sound Guy
Unless the band is really big or are dicks, it really is kinda overpaid. The "specialized equipment" isn't all that complicated and doesn't take so long to figure out and live mixing is pretty easy and fun. I was always kinda taken aback by how well it paid the handful of times that I did it. The only way I can rationalize it is that when things go wrong it's super-stressful, but if you're working at a venue where the mics don't fry from just a bit of spittle and you've got a reasonable amount of time for setup, then it's a breeze.

r|t|c I never tire of telling people about this man! He's a friendly Scottish guy who is terrible at marketing and doesn't wear glasses himself yet spends several months each year researching old warehouses in Italy and shit, trying to find big old cartons of unsold frames from yesteryear.

here's one of his sites - http://www.myspace.com/arckivcamden
here's another - http://www.arckiv.net

he's in the stables at camden market

Oh ty that is cool & I too will look into him. For some reason I thought you were on another continent, otehrwise I also would have asked.

Same here - I really need some new glasses (thread has had me glued to it) and glassesdirect was looking the best option until punchable face.

unfortunately for this fine sounding fellow i'd probably rather go blind than ever venture forth into camden again.

(seriously tho thnx i will check him out!)

Blue jeans. There are work-arounds, fortunately -- you can buy second-hand, or hit smartbargains.com, or things like that. But just walking into the Levi's store cold and paying full retail can make your head feel all swimmy. "Did I really just spend $120 on fucking denim?"

Jesus christ people, sound guys that are cool and good at what they do are the salt of the fucking EARTH as far as i'm concerned.

also, if it's so damn "easy" why are there so few competent ones.

the ones that really know how to do things correctly and know the room make an incredible difference.

also, dudes that know how to manage a 3-4 band bill, keep things running right, ensure that bands get on and off on time....doing the Lord's Work.

^100 percent real talk.

I don't think I've ever spent that much on jeans. Of course I just buy all my jeans at the Gap, there they are $40 to $50 max. Of course they are never going to be as nice as Steve Shasta endorsed jeans.

the contention that "anyone can learn a soundguy's job in 30 minutes" is total nonsense.

M@tt OTM basically

also, maybe this is a US/UK thing but lots of times it doesn't pay well at all.

The solitary pair of jeans that will fit me via smartbargains.com Daaamn, no thanks.

NB I don't pay over $30 for jeans and it shows.

Small venue soundguys in my experience tend to get paid about exactly as much as I'd expect for a job that requires a certain level of technical expertise and involves them being somewhere for up to maybe seven hours, in the evening

I've been curious how James Jeans would fit me. Different brands tend to have signature fits. Levi's are very straight, Express have a bit of butt sag but are v comfy, and H&M jeans display mad package.

American Eagle have a nice middle-of-the-road fit: not too baggy, not too tight. I have some Banana Republic "straight-leg" jeans that my wife calls my "Euro-trash" jeans - not quite Ramones-album-cover level, but still a bit cozy.

mozzarella sticks!

I buy Shasta-friendly-ish jeans. Currently wearing raw Levi Vintage Collection based on jeans from 1937. They are way roomier than anything I've worn recently.

But LVC and good Japanese denim makes some sense to me - they are made on old looms, of quality denim, by people making a reasonable wage (if only in comparison to where Levi's are produced). And if I only buy one pair of jeans to wear for a year (or two), that's not unreasonable for $200 imo.

I can't justify expensive jeans because my waist size changes so frequently. If I knew I was going to stay the same size, $200 might be more feasible.

I have never worn anything besides Levi's and probably never will

think this was the thread where I complained about glasses prices and people went "oh you should buy them online", so

broke my glasses Sunday night, ordered some online (cz I can get by without for a few days), got panicked last night that they weren't going to turn up by Saturday when I have booked to go to things that I would quite like to be able to see, went to Vision Express

so of course my ordered glasses turned up this a.m. and now I have some £220 glasses and some £22-including-postage glasses, and the former are a little more hip and stylish (though I am completely the opposite of a hip and stylish person so really they just look kind of incongruous) but I cannot say they are 10x better at anything

in other words, pretty pleased w/buying cheap glasses online except for the not getting a dispatch email which might have saved me £200, but nobody to blame except my own worrying for that

I am looking at glasses right now. There's a pair I like but they're $$$. I'm not opposed to spending the money on them, but keep thinking there's a better pair out there (and only want to do this once every 5-10 years, if that). I'm finding it hard to find frames that I see online to try on in person, especially fancy brands.

The Viceroy got some glasses (and some rx sunglasses) from the place mentioned upthread, zenni optical, and he's super happy with them. They look good, too. He'd never had prescription sunglasses before, so it was funny walking out with him into the epic New Mexico sunshine: "I can finally see things!"

out-of-print CDs