Erika Garcia-Niles was shopping for sunglasses at a T.J. Maxx. She put on a pair and couldn't believe how clearly she could see. Were they polarized? "I took them off and it was a 2.0 correction," she says. She's 49. Until that moment she didn't know she needed readers.
In hindsight, the signs were there. She'd been taking pictures of small print and zooming in to read it. Her friends had the same tricks. One bought a label maker for her lipstick tubes. On a girls' trip, everyone borrowed each other's readers to look at their phones. Some of them know they need glasses and still haven't gotten their eyes checked. Buying them, she says, means committing to being old.
Short-arm syndrome
The condition has a name, presbyopia. The lens in your eye changes with age and up-close focus goes. An optometrist in Rockville, Md., says it gets worse each year from 42 to around 57. It often starts with what he calls short-arm syndrome. You push the page farther away. Eventually your arms aren't long enough. Chad Knibbe, 52, kept complaining in his weekly meeting that his monitor was blurry. Everyone told him to get glasses. He said he had perfect vision and the room was just dark. One day 20 coworkers walked in all wearing glasses. He missed the prank and proudly declared he was the last one in the office with perfect eyes. His business partner, who has worn glasses since she was four, can't relate. People who never needed glasses "hold on a lot longer," she says.
Kristjan Backman long bragged about his 20/20 vision. About 10 years ago, before a road trip to the Grand Canyon, he missed a line in his rental-car contract. He ended up agreeing to an $800 upsell. He's 57 now and carries a magnifying glass the size of a credit card in his wallet. His grandmother used to travel with one. He laughed at it then. "It's easy to look back and see the arrogance," he says.
Our read
This is a Consumer Protection story, module M11, hiding inside a funny one. The $800 upsell is the whole lesson. The fine print on a contract is written small on purpose, and the people most likely to skip it are the ones who've just started needing glasses. Rental counters, phone upgrades, gym memberships and insurance riders all live in that small type. So do the fee tables on your own accounts.
Here's your check this week, and it costs about $15. Buy a pair of readers and keep them with your wallet, the way Backman keeps his magnifying glass. Then use them once, on purpose, on one document. Pull up the fee page of your biggest retirement account and read the expense ratio of the fund you're in. If it's over 1%, that's a number worth a conversation. If you can't read it without zooming in on your phone, that's the finding too. Vision benefits, by the way, are usually a separate line at open enrollment, and many plans cover an exam and a pair of glasses. You don't wait for the menu to get darker. You get the glasses. Fifteen minutes with the fee page is the same idea.