Some Say Seiko Watches are Overpriced. I Disagree

A few years ago, some astonishingly good deals were to be had on new Seiko watches. I myself bought Seiko 5 with a canvas strap on Amazon for under $50 in 2016. It's a variation of the 5 which first went on sale in 2008. It was my first purchase of a good watch in decades, after I'd spent more several times for watches which were real pieces of garbage by comparison. This is my Seiko 5:

There are many like it but this one is mine. I noticed that it had a price tag on it which said $185. Since then I've noticed MSRP's of $195 and $225 for watches which are identical or identical except for color.

For a long time I assumed that there simply was a huge disconnect between this watch's MSRP and the reality of its marketing. The way that Invicta watches sell for 25% or so of their MSRP, making for hollow drama, repeated daily from scratch, on home-shopping TV shows.

Recently, however, I heard that there had been a huge glut of these Seiko 5's, and the gap between the MSRP's and the selling prices, and some other things, began to make more sense. Seiko had simply made much too many of them, and the only way to move them was to offer them for prices which under ordinary circumstances would have been impossible. 

The intended retail price had been much closer to the MSRP, as usual with Seiko and with most watch brands.

I had not been the only one who had bought a Seiko for an amazingly low price. A price so low that it was actually very hard to understand how it was possible. Many people bought them at those prices. Many people got used to these amazing prices, and perhaps relatively few noticed the prices on the tags, or thought much about how the low prices had come to be, or have yet to realize that they benefited from an unusual market situation.

Seiko stopped making 5's like mine a long time ago, I don't know how many years ago, but I have watched the prices going up as the word gets around that there won't be any more. They cost about twice what paid now, and the prices keep rising. 

In the meantime, Seiko announced that they would be concentrating more on higher-quality watches -- a clear indication that Seikos were going to cost more. Seiko did come right out and say: "We made too many of those old 5's, that's why they're so inexpensive. We can't afford to actually keep making them and selling them at these prices, nobody could." Instead, they started making a completely different line of 5's. Even the "5" on the dials of the watches is completely different now. And they are substantially improved technically. 

The prices tags haven't changed very much, though: Seiko 5's start at $275 now, up from $225. If you compared MSRP's it could be very easily argued that Seiko is offering more value per dollar with the new, bigger 5's with their improved movements.

But of course, people don't compare price tags. They compare what they actually paid back then to the actual prices now, which tend to be 75 to 100% of MSRP, as usual with Seiko over most of the course of its history, as usual with watches in general. And what looks to me like a return to normal pricing after a freakish market situation brought on by overproduction and a market glut, looks to many other people like greed on Seiko's part.