Spill the tea on luxottica
Luxottica is the fucking devil. They are a wicked, capricious megacorporation that gleefully led the optical industry into perdition and then peddled platitudes like they were going out of style about supporting small practices while fucking us sideways everywhere and every way they got a chance to. Fuck them, and hereās why:
Firstly, for the unaware, Luxottica (-Essilor, NATCH, MORE ABOUT THAT IN A MOMENT) is an Italian megacorporation. They own exclusive manufacturing rights to just about every luxury brand that youāve ever heard of, and are one of four major frame manufacturers (the others are Safilo, another Italian megacorporation, Marchon-Altair, and Marcolin) but none of them are on level with Luxottica. As I am typing this, Luxottica owns:
-like I said, pretty much every high fashion luxury brand youāve ever heard of, as well as Sunglass Hut
-not just one optical retail chain, SEVERAL OF THEM. Lenscrafters, Pearle Vision, Target Optical, Costco Optical, Samās Club Optical, Searās Optical, pretty much everywhere thatās not a private practice that accepts Eyemed is owned by Luxottica. Why?
-THEY ALSO OWN EYEMED VISION INSURANCE. Eyemed is the second largest vision insurance in the entire fucking country.
-Essilor? You know, largest manufacturer of eyeglass lenses? Creators of such iconic products as the Varilux progressive line, gold-standard anti-reflective coating line Crizal, the Eyezen anti-fatigue lens, that lovely anti-fogging coating that yeah, exists by the way! It has for years! YEAH THEY MERGED WITH THEM. THE NAME OF THE COMPANY IS ACTUALLY ESSILOR-LUXOTTICA.
So hereās the scenario. You spend a premium to have your Luxottica-brand vision insurance. You then take it to a Luxottica-brand retail chain, where you buy Luxottica-brand frames that are manufactured in a Luxottica-brand lab, and the payout from your insurance goes back to this Luxottica-brand retail chain. Which means that all of that money? YEAH IT STAYS WITHIN THE GENERAL CORPORATE STRUCTURE OF LUXOTTICA. FOREVER.
And Luxottica treats its employees like shit. Everyone thatās ever worked for any of their numerous retail chains can tell you how shady, unhelpful, uncooperative, and willing to fuck you over they are. Itās a shady, cut-throat, bloated behemoth of capitalistic excess that has found a way to turn itself into a perpetual money machine by directly incentivizing the people caught its web to just keeping spending their money within the structure of the corporation.Ā They reinvented the company store, and they made it a vision insurance.
Louder, for the people in the back:Ā
