Wal-Mart Vison

I am an optician with over twenty years in the field and have several friends who work for Wal-Mart as licensed opticians and as doctors of optometry and the issues that face Wal-Mart about quality come down to profits pure and simple.

For years the labs whether Crawfordsville, Dallas, Columbus, or Fayetteville have had some consistent problems with quality in my experience specifically with lenses falling out of the frames. There are other, “you get what you pay for” issues that you could argue are quality related as well. For example, the anti-reflective and scratch coatings that are most often used are some of the worst I have ever seen and the polarized single vision lenses are without a doubt the poorest quality I have ever come across in terms of optics and lamination.

Some people argue that you can have a problem anywhere it is just one of those things but I see something else.

What I see is that the problems encountered are endemic to a system that is a slave to greed and a false sense of autonomy, a company that sees itself as the final authority of all things, ethics, morality, and even law. And it is in this arrogance that the people who place their TRUST in Wal-Mart are taken advantage of. I address this to the professionals in the field who defend Wal-Mart who may be ABO and/or NCLE certified or state licensed, I know that you take what you do as a profession seriously and that you know that what you do is much more than “sell” a product. I also know that tens of millions of US citizens are protected by state and federal laws that regulate what you and I do. States from New York to Florida, twenty-one in all I believe, have determined that the service we provide affects the health, safety, and welfare of the public to the extent that a person licensed by the state must at all time be present in order to do business, EVEN if a doctor is present and working. Yet Wal-Mart seems to be making a practice of violating the law by not having licensed opticians on staff in sufficient numbers to avoid subverting the law. In the area my friend works she knows of half a dozen stores that do not have the legally required coverage and this condition has been consistent for YEARS yet Wal-Mart does nothing. Their marketing for licensed opticians is a word of mouth secret society sort of thing and they claim they have such trouble finding what the law requires they have to do business. So they are illegally and artificially keeping your wages lower than the market forces they swear allegiance to would dictate if they did the right thing, the moral thing, the ethical thing, the legal thing.

A young lady at a Wal-Mart lab said “...blame the crappy jobs on management. Our QA people are great but when they show a job to management, they tell them to send it. If there is an argument management threatens them... A few others and I...try to catch some of the bad jobs and purposely break them to force a total redo. It wrong but I would rather cost the lab some money than lose the customers.”

The pressure to do the wrong thing comes from the store level as well. I have another friend who is a doctor and she was telling me that a DISTRICT MANAGER was telling opticians to dispense improperly made eye wear to keep remakes down because they were affecting profits.

The problem the young lady at the lab highlights and the problem the doctor witnessed support perfectly the contention that it is the greed of the management that blinds them from the right thing and make criminals out of the innocent kind of like Nazi Germany in the 30’s and 40’s. Wal-Mart might not discriminate based on race or ethnics or national origin but what about based on disposable income, need, trust and ignorance? Wal-Marts president Lee Scott made $23,767 AN HOUR last year! Tell me it's not about money.

Thank You,

Susan