America's Best Contacts & Eyeglasses Everyone knows the two-fer deals are a bait & switch scam, but wouldn't it be nice if their lenses actually worked? Keizer Oregon

With my rather ordinary prescription for moderate nearsightedness, we knew that bifocal lenses, decent frames, etc. would inflate the "two for $69.95" to something like half a grand, so the actual bill, $473.95, was expected.

What I didn't expect, after 50-plus years of wearing glasses, each pair of which was always at least the equal of the one before it, was that the ones from America's "Best" (and I use that term very loosely) would be virtually useless.

Stupid me, before I left the store I didn't bother to look outdoors through the new glasses at any distance that would be affected.  Past experience made it an easy thing to take for granted.  While driving home, the issue became much more evident.  One set of new lenses was marginally functional at intermediate range; the other, completely useless.  Neither pair gave any correction at any distance beyond about fifty yards.

In retrospect, this shouldn't have been a surprising outcome.  The eye exam was a whiz-bang in-out affair that took about one-third the amount of time as any other I'd ever had.  Instead of narrowing down the parameters with a decent series of increasingly fine incremental changes, as every other optometrist had done, this test involved just a few coarse shortcut measurements per eye, and even those minimal steps were done in such haste that I had to ask for a repeat on several of them.

I brought back both pairs of glasses the next day, along with the old ones, which were checked by the same optometrist who tested my eyesight.  He proclaimed that since I could read one of the lowermost lines on a chart projection, it meant that with the new glasses on, my vision was 20/15, the difference between test results and old prescription was only 1/4 of a diopter, which can't possibly make that much difference, blah, blah, blah.  He twisted one lens, by slightly distorting the frames, on the supposition that it had been installed slightly off-axis.  This did make a small difference at close range, but as soon as I went back outdoors, it again became obvious that I did not have glasses that not only didn't match the old ones, but were, for distance vision, useless.  "Give them another try and you can always come back if they're still not right, and we'll see what we can do."  Or words to that effect.  The sensation afterward wasn't so much one of having visited an optician as a used car salesman.

I'll skip that second trip back for more of the nothing that the first go-around with this outfit yielded, and when I can afford it, I'll take these new frames to an optical provider that doesn't have Mcfranchises all over the country.