[dangrossman]

You can go directly to an optometrist's own office, and they'll usually have a selection of frames they can sell you, or you can just get the prescription and take it to another store. Chain stores like Lenscrafters have office space for an optometrist in the back of each building which they lease to one or more doctors; they don't work directly for the store, but they work at the store and the store books appointments with them for its customers.

[pavel_lishin]

Note that some optometrist shops really hate giving away the prescription, since they want you to buy the lenses and frames from them. I'm not sure about the legality of this, but I've had some tell me over the phone that they wouldn't release my prescription to me. (I didn't bother fighting them, I just moved on to the next one.)

[starpilot]

That is illegal in the US; the FTC entitles you to a copy of your prescription [1]. This doesn't include your pupillary distance, but shops will tell you whether or not they'll give PD as well. Some places I called offered to measure mine for free as a walk-in, it's pretty quick.

[1] http://www.ftc.gov/bcp/edu/pubs/consumer/alerts/alt143.shtm

[pavel_lishin]

PD seems like something that you could measure at home with a pretty high degree of confidence.

[starpilot]

Many people do. I'd still rather trust an optician using a PD meter though.

[_delirium]

I've found that, oddly enough, both the high-end and the low-end tend not to hassle you much, and instead it's sort of the middle-range optometry shops that are trying to make a bunch of money on in-house lens/frames sales.

Just about the cheapest place to get an eye exam is in the Wal-Mart vision department, and they're happy to hand over the prescription. Of course, they run the vision dept in part to try to sell you lenses/frames (or contacts), but it's a very corporate/streamlined place, and the actual employee working there doesn't mind if you want the prescription to take elsewhere.

On the other end of the scale, places that look more like a doctor's office than a frames showroom tend to be pretty professional about it. Since I have very strong myopia with some risk of retinal problems as a result, I've been going to a place that's a partnership between an optometrist and an ophthalmologist (M.D.) who do a more thorough eye-health exam, and there it's basically expected that I'll want to take the prescription with me.

[pavel_lishin]

In my experience, the actual optometrist at Walmart is basically running his own business, he just happens to be renting the space from the chain, and doesn't really interact with them all that much.

[ams6110]

It's like auto repair. A big chunk of the profit in a repair shop is the markup on parts. If you bring in your own parts, they don't make as much money doing exactly the same work.

The optometrist's exam prices are probably lower than they would otherwise be because he makes some amount of profit on the sale of frames and lenses. If the model becomes: get a script and buy the frames online, then the prices for exams are going to eventually go up.

[keithpeter]

That seems a bit childish as of course people move on to another optician.

I'm about to find out what happens in UK!