A recent photo of the America Optical main office in Southbridge, MA (the AO in Southbridge.) It is now known as the Southbridge Innovation Center.
A recent photo of the America Optical main office in Southbridge, MA (the AO in Southbridge.) It is now known as the Southbridge Innovation Center.
I remember that place. For a short while I worked at the B&L lab in Hartford, CT,, and we used to refer to the competition as “American Obstacle.”
Andrew
"One must remember that at the end of the road, there is a path" --- Fortune Cookie
I worked there after school in 1956-58 until I went off to college. I worked for a lot of good people. Do you by any chance recall the "consent decree" of the late sixties?
COMMENTS CONSENT DECREES: CAN THEY WITHSTAND THE CHARGE OF REVERSE DISCRIMINATION? INTRODUCTION
There has been substantial litigation under the equal employment opportunity provisions' of Title VII of the Civil Rights Act of 1964.2 In spite of this activity, minorities and women are still disproportionately represented in the low income strata of society. 3 Recently, a new problem has been added to the complexities of Title VII litigation. Even as official reports4 reflect the dearth of progress under the Civil Rights Act of 1964, reverse discrimination lawsuits threaten a fundamental aspect of Title VII procedures: compliance through conciliation, as embodied in consent decrees
see all of it:
https://digitalcommons.law.scu.edu/c...text=lawreview
The consent decree that I refer to has nothing to do with the Civil Rights Act but rather with collusion to fix prices and restraint of trade.
Might have missed the mark there by a little bit with the copy paste.
I assume he was looking for this....
"The final suit against AO and B&L began as a complaint made by an independent lab owner in Wisconsin to his US Senator when he could not get a listing with either AO or B&L. “The Milwaukee Case”was filed in 1961, and was settled by a consent decree in 1966. AO and B&L were enjoined for 20 years from opening more than five new wholesale labs a year, and could not engage in the retail business for five years.These three consent decrees changed the US optical industry. When AO and B&L labs no longer had financial advantages, they could no longer compete effectively against independent labs. The independent labs were free to take advantage of optical laboratory innovations at a time when AO labs became burdened with increasingly antiquated AO machinery."
page 6 from here is where I got it.
Yes, I remember the consent decree, although at first it had minimal impact on my own life as an optician. My time at B&L was a summer job. Otherwise, I was in my father's OD office and he used TAT Fairfield in Waterbury, CT as his primary lab, and had done so for years.
Andrew
"One must remember that at the end of the road, there is a path" --- Fortune Cookie
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