Pros
Sometimes you meet interesting people (e.g. professionals who can afford not to care how outrageously overpriced their glasses are) and you get to help them with interesting problems. Even though you're just a salesperson, you develop some expertise that you can share with your customers. It's fun to help some people choose their frames (I really like finding funky frames for frumpy middle-aged ladies). With commission it is *sometimes decent money.
Cons
Stores are chronically understaffed (which makes it impossible to provide good customer service). Associates are barely trained, but are represented as trained opticians. Glasses are criminally overpriced, which makes them hard to sell to anyone remotely savvy in 2013. The chain is ridiculously technologically backward. in many cases it isn't possible to provide decent customer service because even the most basic questions (e.g. is this frame available at a nearby store?) can't be answered online or efficiently. It is unbelievably frustrating to tell a customer who wants to see a frame in a different color that it can't be ordered for her or shown to her online. The technology stores use is user-unfriendly and buggy. You'd think a firm with near-monopoly power in its industry that suddenly faces actual competition would make a strong effort to provide a better customer experience than the cheap internet competitors, but it seems LC is going out of its way to provide a worse customer experience: customers wait a long time (when it's busy) to finally meet with an untrained, barely paid salesperson whose only interest is in making more commission and SPIFFs. Because the "sales" are really permanent price hikes (so complete pairs can be "discounted" for marketing purposes), the "50% employee discount" is a joke--more like 10% (though the free pair of glasses/year is nice).