I bought my originals for $5 in a little hole in the wall place. Best sunglasses I ever had and I literally miss them every time I put on any sunglasses. Although you can find them much cheaper than $600, I've seen prices as high as $2700. It took me three years to find out who made them, serial number, etc. and then I waited 3 more years because I just couldn't justify the price.
Last night, I figured I'd waited and been frugal enough and just bought a pair.
I'm generally not keen on sales people, either as a consumer or as a coworker. It's takes a lot to make me say something like this but they're generally pretty &#?$ing stupid. I hate stupidity with a passion.
When it comes to consumers, sales and marketing are always out of touch. They don't know how to listen to you, especially if you know better. There's a director of marketing at work, none of us can figure out how he still has a job (and this is across two departments and I span both IT and marketing/design because I have professional skills in both), he's so bad at it because he won't listen to anyone else even when they have hard-copy printed stats and explain it and he's completely out of touch with current trends, technology, what's actually worth dealing with. Sales people are pushy and they try to get you to buy instead of letting you think. They want to up-sell and treat you like a walking wallet. It's denigrating, to say the least. I've been known, as a consumer mind you, to walk away from high dollar deals because the sales person wouldn't shut up and listen to me. My ex and I had reason to look for a car (and because of her tendency for car sickness, we had to drive a large number of them) and stopped at one dealership to test drive a vehicle. I could smell his high pressure play from a mile off. I explained to my ex exactly what he would do step by step up to the actual pitch. About 75% of the way through his crap, she just got up, turned around and walked off without a word. Her family wasn't exactly bright, either. They were always trying the "get rich quick" marketing schemes and wanted to drag the whole family in on it. I had had enough of their games and one night when they tried to get me into another one of their MLM attempts I had just had enough and said "When you make a notable amount of money on this, then come back and talk and I'll be willing to listen." Boy were they sore about that. So was my ex. Funniest thing is that they never made any money from it. It's just something about sales that make people stop thinking. It's crazy.
I'm looking at the new oakley lineup... the damn sale people are so fucking pushy I just leave... at one point I had money in hand to buy a pair but they're so in your face about it... My current pair is from China Town, (Spadina, Toronto).