Reading glasses sold at drug stores are not prescription glasses. I should have used that term. They are not the same:
https://www.aclens.com/Content/Display/161
The bank teller in the TZ episode had horrible eyesight and I doubt that cheap wallgreen glasses would have helped. He also would have had to walk over the rubble nearly blind to find a store that was not vaporized by the blast.
They would at least allowed him to see enough to grind some new ones!..................
On that I can agree. The poor eyesight of the bank teller, as shown by his Coke bottle glasses, could be approximated by using multiple lenses stacked up adding more and more magnification until he could read the page. Not the optimal solution, but workable.
I always thought, from the first time I saw the episode when it first aired, that he was not too bright, and not a forward thinker, entirely driven by someone else's ideas. He had stacked his books he intended to read out in the weather; the first good rain and/or wind would have ruined them beyond use. That does not demonstrate good thinking at all, just as being careless with his all-too-important spectacles did not as well.