Boots has forced nearly 12,000 glasses wearers to wait more than 10 weeks for eyewear after the company closed the vast majority of its opticians outlets.
The retailer has continued to operate its high street pharmacies and stores throughout the coronavirus outbreak but shut all but 51 of its 600 opticians stores in March. It put the vast majority of optical staff on furlough.
Since then, thousands of customers who bought glasses just before lockdown, or brought in existing pairs for repair, have been forced to wait weeks to receive sometimes essential eyewear stuck in the closed stores.
Customers complained that they had found difficulty in getting any updates on deliveries of glasses for which some had already paid hundreds of pounds.
One customer wrote on the retailer’s Facebook site: “I bought my glasses [on 20 March] and they are ready to collect in a store but the store is closed. I contacted Boots a couple of times now and every time they are saying ‘we requested for a new pair and they will be delivered to you within 2-3 weeks’ and after that no glasses! I called them today and apparently there is no new order in the system! This is a joke.”
Another said she had struggled to track down what had happened to her husband’s glasses, which had been taken in for adjustment in February. “I have called them twice three weeks ago and [in May] and they have given me contradicting information and are unable tell me where the nearest open hub to me is – I am at loss where to go.”
Boots said it hoped to deliver all glasses for which it had a validated address within the next week. It delivered 3,000 pairs between Friday 29 May, when it was first contacted by the Guardian, and Thursday 4 June.
Boots said it had been slow to deliver glasses because it did not have a delivery infrastructure in place before lockdown. It also did not have the correct address details on file for some customers and had to contact them to update. It added that some orders had not been paid in full and the customer would normally have expected to finalise payment when they picked up the glasses.
The company said that some customers had specified they would prefer to come into an opticians for a fitting, before it was clear how long the lockdown would last.
A spokeswoman for Boots said: “Given the time that has passed, we have since made the decision to deliver these glasses with instructions for customers on next steps.”
It added that for categories of glasses that are restricted from delivery without a fitting, such as children’s glasses, it had set up a mobile fitting service to assist.
