Review: Costco Optical

I've been wearing glasses or contacts since I was about 12. As I've aged, my eyes have gotten worse and my glasses prescription has become more complex. For the last 20 years or so, I've bought my glasses from the optician associated with my optometrist or ophthalmologist. Vision insurance paid for some of the cost, but had to be used at certain locations. Even with insurance, my glasses cost a lot so I had to wait every 2 years before getting a new pair; I believe my last pair of glasses cost over $600 out of pocket with insurance picking up about the same. That's just crazy for a pair of glasses!

My parents have been using Costco Optical for years and have generally been satisfied with them. This year after my eye exam, I wasn't eligible for insurance to cover anything on my glasses, so I decided to try out Costco. My ophthalmologist warned me about their lenses and said they weren't as good as the ones her optician sold. How many companies actually manufacture lenses? I know that Luxottica basically has corned the market on vision insurance, frames, lenses and retail outlets! I figured I didn't have much to risk trying out Costco; they do have their own lab in Chula Vista (south of San Diego) and computers do most of the work grinding the lenses.

A few weeks ago, we went to Eyeglass World to buy my son new glasses (he wanted the same ones he already had so that was easy). My wife and I looked at frames and they had a decent selection of frames. Going through the numbers, 2 pair of glasses for me (regular glasses and computer glasses) would have been $700, I believe. We decided to visit Costco to see what they could do. Costco's frame selection isn't as large, but we both managed to find frames that we liked. I found "designer" Oakley frames that were about $85 (frame only) vs the standard frames that ran about $50; definitely lower priced than other places, but the frame price is only a small fraction of the cost of a pair of glasses for me.

My wife picked out sunglasses and regular glasses; I picked regular and computer glasses. Both of us have pretty bad eyes and need progressive lenses in high index material that tends to drive up the price. I like transitions (darkening) in my regular glasses so that adds to the cost. By the time we were done with our glasses, it cost us $700 for 4 pair of glasses (my wife had about $150 in insurance benefit)! Wow, after we paid I told my wife that if the glasses work out, there will never be a reason for me to wait for insurance to kick in to buy new ones!

I've been wearing the glasses for a few weeks now and it took a little getting used to the computer glasses (the other glasses are about the same prescription as my last ones). I'm pretty impressed with them; I can see well and I really like the frames. The optician I went to had 1 or 2 men's styles and nothing like what I got. I'm really kind of surprised how much I like my glasses. They seem well made and the prescription seems on target.

Pros

• Excellent price
• Backed by Costco
• 90 day guarantee to make it right (i.e. wrong prescription, made wrong, etc.)

Cons

• Limited selection of frames
• Limited choices on lens options (Costco offered 2 types of Transitions; Eyeglass World offered 4 including 1 that would change while driving)

Summary
If you wear glasses and need new ones, I would definitely check out Costco. The price is truly amazing and I couldn't be happier with the quality of the lenses.

Does privacy really exist?

The other day my wife and I were talking about the Live scan requirement for AB 506 that I'll have to do as I'm a Scout leader even though I have been live scanned before to renew my EMT certification once. Live scan is done on a per organization/company basis and is a snapshot in time making it somewhat pointless in my opinion.

My wife suggested that the live scan results aren't shared because of privacy concerns which got me thinking about how much privacy most people can have in today's society.

Whether you like it or not, you're being tracked by the government and various companies. For instance, every time you use a credit card, the date/time, location, and name of the vendor is tracked by the credit card company. While it may be to help prevent fraud, they can build a pretty detailed picture of you just based on your buying habits. Likewise if you have a club card at a super market or shop at Costco, you can bet the data is being used to target you for ads.

Many people don't realize that they've accepted this "invasion" of privacy as they have to sacrifice it for convenience. In addition to your shopping habits, if you own your house it does not take much to figure out where you live.

Let's get into the more subtle ways you're being tracked. I just read an article the other day how many law enforcement agencies in San Diego county are using License Plate Readers (LPR) which can give law enforcement a decent idea of your driving habits if you happen to pass by the readers (some are on police cars and others may be stationary). LPR is not just used by law enforcement. The University Town Center mall uses LPR in its parking garages so you can exit without having to insert your ticket in the machine. If you frequent the mall, your habits are being tracked.

If you think that your ad blocker and turning off location services on your cell phone prevent you from being tracked, you're mistaken. Cell phone companies can know which cell towers your phone hits as it is required in order to route calls to you. Do they keep that data and do something with it? I have no idea, but it is quite possible and not just some made up stuff seen in TV shows.

Do you have a car with "connected services" in it? You're being tracked. While you can ask the company to turn off all services, you lose the ability to have collision notification, vehicle theft recovery and some other features. In order to have the convenience and safety of these features, your location is being tracked. I have no idea what the car manufacturers are doing with this data, but they're collecting it. Even if you don't subscribe to the services and don't explicitly opt-out, they still may collect the data as the cost to keep a live cellular connection in your car is minor compared to what they can do with your data.

Don't forget about your Netflix or Amazon Prime history. When and where you watch a show along with what the show is can be valuable data that forms a picture of who you are and what you do.

Is there anything you can do about staying private? I suppose you could always pay cash, stop using a cell phone, drive a car without connected services (or rip out the cellular connection), avoid all places with LPR, etc. Is this practical, not really? Does this mean you should just give up on privacy? I don't think so, but you have to be realistic on what you can control and how much will it inconvenience you.

Personally I'm not going to change my habits, but I am very cognizant of what I post, when I post it (posting stuff on vacation could give a clue that I'm away from home), and how much I share. That's really all I can do without wearing a tin foil hat and living off the grid.

The Promise of Wireless CarPlay

I've been a huge fan of CarPlay for 5 years and can't imagine a car without it. Lately I've been reading about adapters to make wired CarPlay into wireless CarPlay. This sounded perfect as I wouldn't have to take my phone out of my pocket and still be able to use CarPlay.

There are a number of devices out there that are basically hacks that make a car think that a wired device is plugged in and then have the iPhone talk wirelessly to it. None of how to do this is public knowledge and I doubt the manufacturers got Apple to reveal the secret sauce, so I knew things might not be perfect.

I decided on this device as it was small and supposedly had the latest hardware version. Installation was a breeze and I was amazed that it worked just like wired CarPlay except that there was maybe an additional 15 second startup time. Given the convenience of not having to plug in the phone, I could accept the delay.

I happily used the device for a few weeks on short trips around town and was pretty pleased with it. When we went on a longer trip, the device restarted after about 90 minutes. The dongle was warm to the touch and I suspect a big heat sink would mitigate the problem. In addition to restarting after awhile, the music was sounding garbled. At first I thought it was the streaming connection, but plugged in the phone and the issue went away.

One of the interesting, lesser known features of CarPlay is that if you have a garage door opener connected to HomeKit (I now use OpenGarage connected via Home Assistant, a button will appear on CarPlay when you are close to your house that lets you open and close the door. Why not just use the opener in your car, you ask? My wife has had a lot of problems with the HomeLink connected mirror triggering the door and kept sending me messages to open or close the garage. This feature, however, wasn't working reliably with wireless CarPlay and I couldn't pinpoint the problem.

After a bit of thinking about HomeKit and wireless CarPlay, I have a theory. HomeKit, when away from home uses a hub such as an Apple TV or HomePod Mini to communicate. When you're on your local network, your phone talks directly to whatever device. Wireless CarPlay uses Bluetooth to setup a connection from the phone to the car (or device) and then switches to WiFi for the extra bandwidth. The car (or device) creates a private WiFi network for communication. Normally when apps talk to the network, they'll try to use the primary interface (WiFi usually) and then failover to cellular if needed. When using wireless CarPlay, the WiFi connection always will fail and have to failover to cellular. This causes some delay and may be a bit unreliable depending on how long it takes to failover. Apple has an option called Wi-Fi Assist that is supposed to handle this automatically.

So while wireless CarPlay is a great feature, the dongle I purchased had some issues, but what really caused me to return it was opening the garage door; I was just tired of pushing the door button and not having it work.

Frustration with Wireless Service, Who would have thought?

[What follows is a rant about AT&T. If you only want to read my positive and useful posts, please come back for another entry another day.]

I'm not your average consumer when it comes to cellular service. I've been working with cellular phones for almost 25 years and worked for QUALCOMM for 4 years on a variety of projects. We've been on the same AT&T plan for a number of years now (12 GB of data per month for 2 lines) and thought that was adequate. Recently I saw our usage creep up mostly due to the use of Apple Music. I looked at switching to an unlimited plan and the way to get the best rate was to get a teacher discount as my wife is a teacher. Simple, or so I thought.

In order to get the discount, the account has to be in my wife's name. I called AT&T to find out how to do this The person I spoke to said that my wife had to be around and we could do it over the phone. No problem, I'd call back when my wife was around. A few days later I called back when my wife was around and was told that I could do the transfer online and the link was emailed to me. I started the process to do it which was straight forward. I got through to the point where my wife was emailed the link to do the transfer (the email was sent to a new address so I had to bother her less). I entered all the information for her to accept responsibility on the account and it got to the credit check part. I pushed the button, but the credit check failed because our credit is frozen. I unfroze her credit on all 3 credit reporting agencies and tried again. No luck. Same cryptic error message. I tried a few more times. The next day I called AT&T and when I explained the situation, I was told that I had to wait 24 hours after unfreezing the credit to try again (the credit reporting agencies say after 15 minutes the credit is unfrozen and that has been my experience in the past). OK, I waited 2 days and tried again. Nope.

Last Monday I called AT&T when my wife was home and the first time, the call got disconnected (no idea why, but things happen). The next time, I spoke with a really nice woman who worked with me, tried the transfer, spoke to my wife, and eventually got in contact with the fraud/credit department (or whatever it is called) and got the approval to finish the transfer. After about an hour, everything was transferred over. I hoped I was done, but I wasn't. On a side note, it doesn't appear that they actually did a hard pull on her credit.

After the transfer was all set, I went online, created a new account and linked it to the new account number. Here's kind of where the second part of the mess began. I turned on paperless billing and setup autopay. I went through the process to add the teacher discount and my wife got confirmation on her work email that it was setup. The online account set my watch as the phone number for account recovery; of course I can't receive calls at that number because of NumberSync and my attempts to change it failed due to my old account using the same number (my old online account actually had no wireless accounts associated with it). I decided to punt on this for awhile.

Now I had 2 online accounts and really wanted to ditch the old one as it was useless, but it used my phone number as the login (in addition to an email address). The account showed NumberSync for my phone and watch. I made the mistake of unsyncing my watch thinking that it would remove all traces of the wireless accounts from that online account. That was a really stupid move as it actually removed the watch from the wireless account (remember this online account doesn't actually have access to my wireless account). So I used my phone and tried to setup my watch again. It failed a number of times and at one point it setup a completely new number/account for it. After a number of tries, I called AT&T and while speaking with the rep, my watch was able to sync again. I ask the rep to verify that there were only 4 lines on my account (2 phones, 1 watch and 1 hotspot).

Since I'm a bit paranoid about all this working, I checked my account yesterday. Turns out I had 5 lines on the account; there were 2 watches! Huh? How is it possible to have 2 lines for the same physical device (ignore the devices that have 2 eSIMs)? I called AT&T and reached their offshore tech support and quickly got frustrated because the woman was not all that helpful as I simply wanted to cancel a line and demanded that I speak to a supervisor. I was transferred to a US based support person (note to self, always request a supervisor as my experience with offshore tech support has been poor at best).

The support person I spoke with asked what number I wanted to cancel. I replied that I had no idea because I can't directly call the watch. I gave her the IMEI of the watch, but presumably she had that listed for BOTH watch accounts. Eventually she was able to remove the watch line that didn't have recent activity. While I was on the line, I saw in 1 place on the website it said I had paperless billing and wanted to verify that. The rep said that paper billing was active and I had that changed to paperless (that's a $10/line per month discount with AutoPay); not sure why the website showed it was on when it wasn't. Then I checked to make sure AutoPay was on as the website was now showing it was off; it was actually on. To top off all of this, I verified that the teacher discount was active. It wasn't! I had actually gone through the process TWICE before and my wife received confirmation on her work email that it was active. The rep added the discount and on the account I actually now see "Teacher appreciation" which is good.

Where does that leave me? Throughout last week, I've been threatening to just switch to Verizon as they offer a teacher discount as well. They also offer a first responder discount which I'm qualified for as I'm a certified Emergency Medical Technician (EMT); AT&T's first responder discount requires me to work for or volunteer for an agency which I don't. The Verizon unlimited plans are similar to AT&T, but slightly more expensive. Would Verizon give me better support? My AT&T coverage is fine and we've had service through them ever since I got an iPhone 6 (and had them a few times before that). Up until this week, I really haven't had any complaints, but the utter frustration of trying to switch plans and get the teacher discount have made me consider the switch more than once.

While trying to work through this, I visited my AT&T account many times only to have different, incomprehensible error messages presented to me. In addition, I was taken to different links and some help entries gave wrong information about where to find things. The site is extremely slow to load (it isn't my network) and I kept seeing the loading image every time I navigate to anything. I stumbled upon the Customer Service Summary and it said that my monthly bill was going to be $250 per month! Holy cow. After a search, I found a Reddit thread talking about this and my experience is right in line with others. The summary, however, did show me that AT&T didn’t think I had paperless billing (the website said I did have it). While I'm at it, I got a text message to my hotspot telling me that paperless billing was activated. Huh? Why did my hotspot get a message as it isn't my primary number (it is interesting that it does get text messages)? The icing on the cake is that I've received maybe 15-20 email messages confirming my email address.

Does AT&T care? Probably not. Did they offer me a credit for all the time I spent with this fiasco? Nope. I am probably going to send a letter to the CEO of AT&T to let him know what average customers like me think of their service. I suspect it won't change anything, but will make me feel better.

The bottom line is that wireless plans and billing systems are so complex and probably so antiquated that anything other than a person signing up from scratch is bound not to work properly. What I've done can't be all that uncommon, can it be? I’m sure if AT&T worked to make their systems more reliable, not throw strange errors and let people handle more things on their own, they could cut down on support. Must be cheaper to just offshore the support than to try to fix the systems. For a fee, I'm available to find things wrong with their systems.