Somehow, I had the notion that the eyeglass business — dominated as it is by small retailers — was a paragon of mass-customized flexible specialization, the post-Fordist but neo-artisanal mode of production where small, specialized firms align with one another on the fly to get the job done. (Film production, garment manufacture, and computer hardware are often cited examples of flexibly specialized industries.) Alas, that was entirely a function of the fact that I’m such a snob that I only deal with the craftsman-driven relic that is the upper end of the optician world, a world where glasses are custom jewelry, not functional medical appliances.

In a recent glasses-shopping expedition, I found that Luxottica Group, the world’s largest frame maker (everything from Ray-Ban to dozens of licensed names, from Anne Klein to Versace) and owner of Sunglass Hut and LensCrafters, had purchased Cole National — the nation’s largest vision insurer and owner of Pearle. Almost all of the luxury “brand names” featured in the chain opticians are made under license in a handful of Italian or Chinese factories owned by massive vertical conglomerates: Luxottica, Marchon, and Moulin among them.