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These same kids have gotten into a dangerous game of trading contacts and passing bacteria back and forth. Eye infections are nothing to mess with. Don’t believe me? Google “eye infection” and take a look at some of the images — nut not around mealtime.

I’m not a fan of these, but I suppose if you’re not trading them, you might be able to “complete your look.”

- Ira

Why am I charged a processing fee?

We are committed to providing high-quality service and maintaining everyday low prices on all brands of contact lenses. This fee offsets a portion of cost increases related to verification of prescriptions with your eye care provider, fuel surcharges on shipping, and return processing and handling. Since these costs are not directly related to the number of boxes/vials or the brand of lens you order, we apply this processing fee at an order level to maintain the low contact lens prices we offer our customers.

Translation: “In order to artificially appear to have lower prices, we’re adding a handling fee. Also, we’re not going to tell you what the handling fee is until we have your credit card information.”

My response? FAIL

Look for this badge on the lens description pages.

The first time I saw an ad for a FREE TRIAL PAIR of contacts, I thought “how the heck do they do that?” The last time I had contact lenses fitted, I was provided with lenses to try as part of the process. It went a bit like, “Try these for a couple of days and then come back over your lunch on Wednesday and let’s see how they’re working.” After three or four sessions like this, she found the ones that worked best with my eyes.

I’m now aware that this is not necessarily the only way this can go.

The free trial pair offers are set up as an incentive to get you to ask about the lenses when you visit your eye doctor as either a first-time lens-wearer or someone looking to find something more comfortable, economical, or better fitting into a particular lifestyle.

Of the half-dozen varieties in the site’s “Contact Lens Index”, Only the Biomedics 55 don’t offer a “Free Trial” arrangement to prospective wearers. A run-down on the rest, follows:

CIBA Vision’s Focus Dailies and Focus Night & Day lenses offer prospective users a simple form to fill out. Upon completing the form, you get an email with a certificate attached. For Focus Dailies click here. For Focus Night & Day click here.

Bausch & Lomb has yet a simpler way of dealing with the free trial pair. Apparently, they’re not so interested  in harvesting your personal information, they just want to move some contact lenses. To get a free trial pair of the Soflens 66 Toric (or any of the following: Soflens 38, Soflens Multi-focal, or Soflens One-Day), simply print the coupon here and bring it to your appointment.

Johnson & Johnson’s Acuvue free trial form is a multi-page form asking all sorts of questions and gathering all sorts of answers. It’s intimidating and frankly a bit off-putting — especially compared to the others. You can take my word for it, or take a look here. I don’t have the patience for it, and it turns out I don’t need to. In small print above the form it reads:

The certificate is a useful reminder to ask about your Free Trial Pair but it is not required for you to get a Free Trial Pair. You may receive a free trial pair by visiting a participating eye care professional.

Anything to save a few bucks, especially with the bulk-buy discounts and rebates at the contact lens retailers above. Make sure they work for you before committing your hard-earned dollars.

Here is what I found:

• Of the six covered sites they range from roughly the 25,000th most popular site on the internet to the roughly 500,000th most popular.
• All cater primarily to traffic from the United States, with 1-800-Contacts having 88% US traffic to ACLens having 67% US traffic.

Here are the rankings (as of 8/23/2008):

1. 1800Contacts.com - Worldwide: 24,343 / US: 5,234
2. Lens.com - Worldwide: 68,628 / US: 17,242
3. AC Lens - Worldwide: 96,436 / US: 31,450
4. DiscountContactLenses.com - Worldwide: 165,531 / US: 51,401
5. Lensmart - Worldwide: 484,824 / US: 210,379
6. LensWorld.com - Worldwide: 906, 657 / US: 450,367

What does it mean? They’re just numbers, but there is a clear divide between the top four and numbers five and six (who likely get fewer than 1,000 page views a day).

One could argue that you’re better off shopping where a lot of people do for the buying power — and then you’d look at the prices of the most popular and throw that logic (in this case) out the window.

Seems like all of our other necessities are rising in price, I guess we can’t be surprised that contact lenses are beginning to creep up.

Already, the FREE SHIPPING price tiers and offers appear to becoming at least a bit more scarce.

I don’t think there will be any big jumps, but just an interesting note that things are slowly creeping up with inflation. If you need an order, you may save a few bucks ordering sooner rather than later.