My husband and I have been loyal customers of JC Penney Optical - Madison East for years. Our experience in the last 6 months, however, has soured us and we will never return our business again. My hopes in posting our story is to save someone else from the ordeal we're still enduring. We live in a rural area approximately 30 minutes from the store, so keep that in mind when reading about all of the repeated visits below.

My husband has a strong prescription, and after getting an optical exam from the onsite optomitrist, ordered an expensive pair of glasses from their optical center. Delivery was projected to take 2 weeks.

Approximately 3 weeks later, he placed a call to see if they'd come in. Indeed they had, so when he went to the store to pick them up, he found that his vision was somewhat blurred. The technician told him to give them a try - sometimes there is an adjustment period - and come back in a week if it was still off.

A week later, it was no better. He brought them back again and the manager looked at them and made some adjustment to the angle of the lenses. It was an improvement, and so he took the glasses back home with us again.

A short time later - maybe a month? - one of the lenses popped out of the frame. He brought it back again to get it fixed. The woman at the counter pushed them back in and called it "good enough."

By mid-June, three months after the glasses had been ordered, the lens had once again popped out of the frame. This time, the manager decided to replace the frame with one from the store, deeming the orignal as defective. He popped the lenses out and put them into the same (new) frame.

Within an hour, my husband noticed that there was now a chip in the bottom of one of the lenses. He called to report the error, was told the manager had left for the day and that there was nothing they could do over the phone. The manager's day off was supposedly Tuesdays, but he was otherwise "here all the time" so come back in.

Over the course of the next 2 months, he tried visiting at least 5 times and missed the manager every time. He started calling ahead, only to arrive and find that all staff had gone to lunch, the manager went home, etc. His scratch-resistent lenses, in the meantime, were getting all beat up and he could barely see through them.

Finally, mid-September, he caught up with the manager (I think his name is Gary, but am not sure). Gary agreed to defect out the entire glasses since there's been so much that's gone wrong thus far. He ordered a replacement pair and said the wait would be another 2 weeks.

It's now been 5 weeks and we're still waiting. Calls to the store have offered such excuses as "they should be in on today's shipment" and "Hmmmm... They must have lost the order. I'll expidite another pair" (that one was 3 weeks ago). I will be contacting the district manager today to see if they can do anything for us.

After more than aq dozen wasted trips to the store, I strongly recommend that you save your heard-earned money and take your business to a more professional corporation. We are really disappointed and hope that someone else can be saved this ordeal. I would attach photos of the glasses if JC Penney didn't have them lost in their possession somewhere.