Contact Lenses

(Sorry. Generic image off the web. I was too tired to shoot my own.)

I am pretty well legally blind. So, I wear contacts. Without them, the world is a just a blur. I've had to wear corrective eyewear of one sort, or another, since I was very young. Lately, perhaps as long as the past ten-plus years, it's been contacts. I refuse to get laser eye surgery as that, to me at any rate, is just a gimmick. Eyesight is not stable over time. And, by that I mean the deterioration gets worse over time. There is a stable period in the early years, but I have long passed those early years and my prescription gets stronger every year. So, laser surgery will only correct for a finite period of time. Once that time passes, one's vision needs correcting again. So, no thanks. Contacts are the easy way to go, especially the daily throw away ones. Yeah, I know it's environmentally unsound. But, I'm not perfect even though I try to get even the smallest staple on a package into the right recycle bin.

As my current supply is now getting low, I went in on saturday to my neighborhood optical store and bought a new supply. I was going to buy an entire year's worth like I always did, but the cost of an individual month's supply is no different than a whole year's supply, multiplied by the number of months of course. So, there is no cost savings in a bulk purchase like there is in Canada. In a way, it's more honest like this. You are not "forced" to buy in bulk just to "save" a few dollars. And, month to month purchasing is easier to handle than a big purchase all at once. It's just better for the consumer this way. This is one of the things I love about Korea; no high pressure sales techniques to get as much out of you as possible at the present moment.

But, these things are just as expensive here as they are back in Canada; taking into consideration the current exchange rate and the cost of the "new and improved" version of the lenses I use (W600,000=CDN$510). The cost is, for all practical purposes, identical. I was disappointed at that as I was expecting about a 40% savings compared to Canadian pricing. I guess these things, being international name brand items, there is no savings potential here. But, what I did save on is the cost of the eye exam back in Canada; about CDN$100 (W115,000). So, I did save $100 as I would have had to have gotten a new prescription back in Canada before they would have sold me new contacts there. Meh!

Hey! A hundred bucks is a hundred bucks!