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My best experience to date for avoiding price-gouging has actually been at Costco's in-house optical.

My experience with Zenni was of the "you get what you pay for" variety.

So there is a market for a bit more expensive (say 70-100usd) glasses but with a better quality than Zenni.

Oh, wait that was Rayban and it was inhaled by the same company.

Same here. Zenni frames are cheap, and the lenses are pretty good. But the frames are built from cheap plastic, and so are the linkages, they just plate them with metallic coating. I've had the linkages break on 10+ pairs from fairly innocent things like falling asleep with them on.

They work fine, but it's like buying anything else designed to be disposable. Make sure you have a few pairs on hand for backup

I've had lots of Zenni frames and I've had exactly the opposite experience.

I sleep on them, drop them, subject them to all kinds of mistreatment, and they don't break!

Ok, they eventually break, but it takes a few years of mistreatment. I get my $12.95 out of them!

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