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| - There are a number of Advance Opticals listed on Yelp, so evidently it's a chain of some kind. I have never been to any of the others so I have no idea how this Advance compares to its brethren.
This place is a bit of a surprise given that it's located in Gerrard Square, which is not one stop shopping for high quality merchandise. However, Advance is a bit of an anomaly as it is a peddler of name brand glasses, including sunglasses (Coach, RayBan, Prada, Burberry, Armani, etc.).
Things got off to kind of a rocky start for us as the employee who was tending to us was getting nervous about the fact my girlfriend was rifling through the unlocked cases on one side of the store, while I sought to look at glasses on the other side. I tried to provide comfort by ensuring him that she wasn't going to steal anything, but that just made him look at me like, "That's exactly what someone who is about to steal something would say". Once we got over that little trust issue things went quite smoothly.
He was quite honest with me about the fact that one pair of sunglasses I picked could be turned into prescription sunglasses, but that because the lenses were too curved my peripheral vision would look weird (an issue I was unaware of). He easily could have just sold them to me and said "That's what happens with curved lenses" after the fact, but didn't, potentially risking a sale if I was unable to find anything else I liked.
In the end we both picked up a pair of prescription sunglasses.
As for price, there are two prices at play. The price on the frames and the price they actually expect you to pay, which is to say that if you don't negotiate the price you just paid at least 20% more than you had to. The post-negotiation prices are extremely reasonable, while the pre-negotation prices are more the market norm.
They also make their own lenses in house, rather than sending them to one of those huge processing centres.
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