View from the High Street: How low can you go?

Simon Dunn, Specsavers, Nottingham

How low can you go? An age-old question asked of limbo dancers the world over, and during the last 30 years, increasingly asked in the Retail Optics industry too.

I remember almost three decades ago as a trainee dispensing optician for Dollond and Aitchison having many debates with colleagues and customers about how inexpensively you could make a quality pair of spectacle and, often more importantly, how much you could sell them on the high street for. This was of course around the time that Specsavers Opticians was born.

In those days I can remember there being a popular industry opinion that there were ‘proper’ independent opticians,  ‘almost proper’ multiple opticians like D&A or Specsavers - then in a multiple category of its own - and non-registered ‘bucket shops’.