Sep 11th, 2008 at 10:17 am
Thursday Glasses Blogging
Just like your average person with a household income of over $200,000 a year, Sarah Palin wears $375 glasses:
My frames, Nautica model N8606, cost much less and are rapidly becoming CAP standard-issue eyegear since Brian Katulis got a pair a couple of weeks ago.
84 Responses to “Thursday Glasses Blogging”
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September 11th, 2008 at 10:30 am
$375 for glasses? Expensive, but now outrageous.
But seriously, who cares about the price of her glasses?
September 11th, 2008 at 10:35 am
My frames were free (to me, covered by insurance) and look utterly dorky, especially with my cheapskate bifocal lenses. My wife despairs most every time she sees them, but they are very wide (wide stanced frames?) so the temples never rub into the side of my head. That seems to be the most important factor for me!
September 11th, 2008 at 10:35 am
Who cares? People make different choices about how to spend their money. I spend more on bicycle stuff than many people do, but that doesn’t mean I am out of touch with those that choose to spend their “extra” money instead on golf or beer or books or cable television. Except for the poorest of us, we have some discretionary money that we choose to spend however we want. Isn’t that part of the American dream?
I’m pretty sure my spending habits have nothing to do with my fitness to be president or vice-president — I’m sure you can argue that I’m not fit for those offices, but I sure hope there are better reasons than that. I’m confident that there are real reasons not to like Sarah Palin (abuse of power?, lack of interest in foreign policy, constant and repeated lying). Can we focus on those issues that matter?
September 11th, 2008 at 10:37 am
Get over it. My current glasses cost something like $250. I’ve paid almost $500 for glasses in the past. You wear the damn things every single day on your face. No matter how much money you make, it’s worth spending a little time, effort, and, yeah, money, to get a pair that look decent.
Part of the reason I could pay that much for glasses is that my employer has an eye care plan that reimburses me up to $500 a year for eye care expenses. Palin may well have the same thing.
Pork. Lies. Focus on these issues. Palin-is-a-rich-lady-with-expensive-glasses just isn’t going to fly. Eveyone knows that if you’re really rich you either wear contacts or get laser eye surgery.
September 11th, 2008 at 10:39 am
$375 for glasses? Expensive, but now outrageous
Not for the glasses overall, but for the frames. Normal people cough up $50 to $150 dollars for frames unless they have a medical problem. I believe insurance companies usually pony up only about $100,
If she were not running a “log cabin” campaign and trying to smear her opponents as “elitists” this would be irrelevant. Instead, it is just another bit of evidence of how phony her PR campaign is.
September 11th, 2008 at 10:40 am
I hate to pick on you here, but… this is getting a little ridiculous, don’t you think? Upper middle class people have upper middle class tastes. (That goes for your frames, too. Which are nice!)
I doubt anyone running for President is getting their eye-wear from the discount shelf at the Wal-mart Vision Center. And it wouldn’t matter if she did!
September 11th, 2008 at 10:40 am
Is that just the frames or does that include the lenses? Because my glasses cost me in the $350 range, with lenses. It’s a fairly reasonable price to pay for something “nice” that you wear daily and lasts for years.
A decent men’s suit will easily cost more than $375, and you will wear the same suit, at most, only once a week.
September 11th, 2008 at 10:41 am
The notion of the Palins as working class is largely a media construction. Yes, Todd had a union job, but he earned over $100,000 per year. His father Jim was the general manager of a big utility, the Matanuska Electrical Association, and currently lives in Palm Desert, California. The Palins are an upper middle class family from a rural state, where even affluent people engage in pursuits like hunting, fishing, snowmobiling, etc.
September 11th, 2008 at 10:45 am
What’s funny is the alternating posts (we need to talk about the issues–her glasses are expensive–we need to talk about issues)
September 11th, 2008 at 10:47 am
Personally, and I’m sure bdbd’s wife feels the same way, I wish people with the means to do so would spend a little bit more money on their glasses frames.
There’s a reason they call Washington, DC “Hollywood for Ugly People.” Not only that, but American politicians seem to have some of the most medicore taste in clothes of any other world leaders. Thus, I can’t begrudge Palin the fact that, instead of dressing like a politician, she dresses like a normal upper-middle-class person who likes wearing nice clothes.
September 11th, 2008 at 10:49 am
LensCrafters sells loads of frames in the $200-$300 range. For someone in the public eye, $375 is definitely a splash-out, but it’s not like wearing a $300,000 dress.
September 11th, 2008 at 10:50 am
Nerd.
(somebody had to say it)
September 11th, 2008 at 10:51 am
Just because you don’t mind wearing ugly glasses doesn’t mean everyone else needs to wear ugly glasses.
September 11th, 2008 at 10:58 am
Matt, I love your blog, but this is a terrible post. It’s not about the issues, and the pricetag isn’t completely crazy, especially as you give the price as being for glasses rather than frames. I get cheapish frames, but because my eyes are poor the lenses are of an expensive lightweight high-index plastic, and so my glasses cost a couple hundred dollars. A couple hundred dollars for eyeglasses is not that atypical. This woman is perhaps the most unprepared, dishonest, and fanatically social conservative nominee ever – and you waste our time with trivia like ever-so-slightly-fancy eyeglasses? Why?
September 11th, 2008 at 10:59 am
You can pry my contacts from my cold, dead eyeballs. Peripheral vision FTW.
September 11th, 2008 at 11:18 am
you can put really nice glasses on a pig, but it’s still a pig.
September 11th, 2008 at 11:21 am
The price really isn’t that big of a deal. Percentage-wise, it’s like paying $50 for a hair cut if most people pay $30 (so that figure is approximate: since I cut my own hair, I actually have never paid for a haircut, so I don’t know what they really cost). I think the more important aspect of this story is that she found an optometrist who does housecalls. Such a service would be expensive, and is clearly the mark of the privileged class, not the gee whiz next door neighbor-type that she claims to be. The point isn’t the money, but that the image she projects is mostly a sham.
September 11th, 2008 at 11:22 am
That’s great Matt. Please continue to keep us updated on all fashion-accessory-price developments.
September 11th, 2008 at 11:47 am
Like others, I don’t really care about Palin’s glasses. However, the first thing I noticed when she was introduced were the glasses, and my first thought was that they were very expensive. I know, because I looked at similar designs last time I shopped and found out that they are REALLY expensive. And it isn’t just the frames. Notice that you mount the lenses by drilling through them. That dramatically increases the cost of the lenses.
September 11th, 2008 at 11:52 am
$2K for Lasik was the best money I ever spent.
September 11th, 2008 at 12:02 pm
Wow, she spends almost as much on her glasses as John Edwards does on his haircuts. She really must be out of touch.
September 11th, 2008 at 12:26 pm
Gee, Matt, are you competing in the Inane Triviality Olympics also?
September 11th, 2008 at 12:27 pm
My Burberry frames cost $150. Does that make me an elitist?
September 11th, 2008 at 12:42 pm
But she saved a bundle on car insurance!
September 11th, 2008 at 12:44 pm
-1
September 11th, 2008 at 3:22 pm
Sarah Palin’s friends from aerobics call themselves the elite six, that’s hilarious! I called my group of friends the Thunder Friends but I was six so I guess it was more ok for me.
September 11th, 2008 at 3:31 pm
More to the point, who pays for her glasses? Does she have insurance, or is she getting some kind of government coverage like the Feds do?
I think you meant that her frames cost $375, which makes them expensive frames. Not crazy expensive, but expensive. My insurance company would only cover a fraction of that cost – I think they’ll put up something like $99 towards frames.
I wonder how the Fed program works. I need to find out – if it’s good enough, maybe I’ll run for Congress. My rep’s a jerk anyway…
September 11th, 2008 at 3:35 pm
She is 44, and there’s a good chance that she wears bifocals. She may even be wearing trifocals (one partition for looking at, say, a computer screen, a second partition for far away objects, and the final partition for reading). If you get thin lenses with no visible line, the lenses become quite expensive.
And then there are the frames. She’s wearing fashionable expensive frames.
September 11th, 2008 at 3:51 pm
The real story is halfway through with her little idiot friends vapiding around the camera “I have never voted for a republican for presidential” . It is so great. It’s like a dullness pageant where everyone wins best place.
September 11th, 2008 at 7:43 pm
I’m going to have to cut her some slack here. My glasses were $186–for me. When you add the part that insurance paid, it’s probably close to $500. I have astigmatism and I’m nearsighted enough that if I didn’t get the high-index lenses, I’d have serious Coke-bottle bottoms going on.
The real question is, why are glasses–an essential item for people who need them–priced so that it’s difficult to get them without vision insurance, which many workplaces don’t offer?
September 11th, 2008 at 7:54 pm
Wow, darkrose, you’re lucky. Mine cost $400 after the insurance. I have weird problems which require lots of whackadoodle stuff, and the worst of it is that I actually need two separate pairs of bifocals, one for driving, and one for the computer and reading. And my insurance only pays part of one pair every other year. So the pair I pay for all by myself – the reading glasses, which don’t require prisms, so they’re cheaper – were $500+ two years ago.
I agree – why are they so expensive? And how about dental care? Why is that so fricking expensive? And I’ve got insurance!
September 11th, 2008 at 8:24 pm
There is a glasses making monopoly in America you can get lenses online for like 30-50 dollars for a pretty extreme prescription in the lightest thinnest lenses.
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