If you want to know why anything is the way it is in the USA, it’s easy: the answer is always money. In this case, lobbying from optometrists and opticians leads to regulatory capture and a market we are forced to use.
Money? State legislatures have limited budgets and are not well rewarded for funding the DMV.
Private retail locations (there are some in the US too -- in California, at least, you can go to the AAA if you pay their membership fee) can charge the right amount needed to pay a sufficient number of skilled employees, or they go under. The government-run DMVs have to scrape by with whatever the state affords them.
I do not live in the US, but even i know the DMV being bad is a meme.
What i don't understand is why people have to visit this DMV. There isn't even an equivalent in the UK; licensing is done by the DVLA, but they don't have local offices, it's just a civil service office block in Swansea. If you want to do licensing stuff, you do it by post, or online, or via a local post office.
It's actually relatively rare in my experience these days where I live in the US that you need to go to the DMV. And the last time I did have to go to get a new license (vision test, photo), as I recall it was pretty unmemorable one way or the other. If you're a AAA (American Automobile Association) member, you can also get some DMV transactions handled in one of their offices.
Most things have moved online. I needed to get a replacement license about a year ago and the online process was easy as could be.
Unfortunately this is what happens when companies are allowed to operate completely unabated. They'll gladly build up a monopoly and try to make it as invisible as possible while lobbying behind the scenes to reduce regulations for them and add regulations to prevent challengers.
We have multiple markets like this in the US which have occured as the result of consolidation and lobbying and we're just...not doing anything about it. While they exercise rent-seeking behaviors in order to gouge customers.
This is the opposite of completely unabated. The government created a regulatory burden against consumers, ostensibly for their own good, forcing brick and mortar stores into complying.
Unabated would imply that such regulations are not enforced or in place, and you're starting to see that with online retailers that will sell you anything eye-wear related with a little warning that you're agreeing you do have a valid prescription, which noone believes anyone will get in trouble for lying about. (I.e. zenni)
The same is starting to be true for cpap machines and other things as well.
You can blame certain companies, you can blame certain politicians and bureaucrats, but you cant blame all companies or that companies are running "unabated". It is disingenuous, facile and simply incorrect.
