Keeps on Tickin'

I had a feeling that if I put this old Timex on my wrist, this automatic made in 1979 (it has a serial number), which I bought for $2 at yard sale in sale in 2004 and which hadn't been running for a while, it would run again. At the same time, another voice in my head said that the hope was delusional, that the watch was an old, nun-running, non-salvageable piece of junk.

That was a few hours ago, and now it's running again. Just as before, setting the time was very difficult, and I didn't even want to attempt to set the date.

And just as before, before today I had given up and concluded that this watch didn't run anymore, only to change my mind after wearing it for a few hours and seeing that, yes, it does run. How many times have I gone through this whole cycle now, giving up, regarding the watch as not running, and then having it pleasantly surprise me (except for setting the date)? At least twice. Maybe more than that.

I don't remember, from the previous times, whether the date still turns over at all, or if it did when I first owned it and then stopped at some point.

I've never had this watch serviced. I've never done any watch repair myself. The idea of servicing any Timex seems absurd to me. 

The whole subject of Timex tends to anger me. Timex was the main cheap watch brand of which I was aware when I was a kid (born 1961), and since learning about other brands in the past few years, I've felt I was cheated in my childhood, because their were other brands which were much better and no more expensive. Notably Seiko. 

But here this Timex is, running again.

But one watch's performance, one out of millions, is an anecdote, not an indication of a brand's quality.

I'm confused and full of conflicting feelings. That may already have been obvious to empathetic readers.

I wrote before on this blog that the little kid running the yard sale gave me a look when I bought this watch, a look which I interpreted as, "What a schmuck, spending $2 on this piece of junk!"

Lately I've wondered whether that look meant something completely different. Maybe the kid wanted her Dad's old watch, and he told her, "Okay, if nobody buys it at the yard sale, you can have it." Maybe the look I interpreted as incredulity at my throwing my money away, actually expressed bitter disappointment. 

Maybe someday I'll become so famous as a writer that the kid will contact me and finally get her Dad's watch back. Of course, she's not a kid anymore. Maybe she doesn't care about watches any more. Maybe she never did. I've only speculated about what her attitude was back in 2004, without ever having known her.

Now that I've written this post, maybe a bunch of schmucks will pretend to be her and try to get a watch fraudulently.  

I could probably sell it. For a lot more than $2. I don't really want to.

CNBC and Fossil Watches

A recent CNBC piece looked at the recent struggles of the watch brand Fossil. They skyrocketed to success in the 1980's with cheap disposable watches disguised as quality products, and in the last few years their revenues and stock prices have been plummeting.

Fossil watches (and the other watch brands Fossil manufactures such as MVMT and Michael Kors) are crap -- disposable crap made for a couple of dollars per piece and sold for $50 and up. That MIGHT be relevant to their recent struggles. 

 

Maybe Timex, championed in this ridiculous CNBC segment as a return of affordable quality, can be considered something other than garbage, but only when compared to something like Fossil, or like the mechanical watches Timex made up until 1981. In the whole piece, there was no mention of:

-- Seiko mechanical watches. CNBC mentioned that Seiko introduced quartz watches in the 1960's, but not that they are known, from before the 1960's to the present day, for offering good value for mechanical watches.

-- The many small independent brands who are competing for the low-priced end of Seiko's market share ($50 to $200 or so), as Seiko prices go a bit upscale.

 

 

-- G-Shock, quartz watches made by the Japanese corporation Casio. Most G-Shocks cost under $100, a few really fancy ones cost low four figures. 

 

The CNBC piece attributed much of Fossil's trouble to the Apple watch. There have been over 100 million Apple watches sold. There have also been over 100 million G-Shocks sold. True, G-Shock has had longer to do it, they started in 1983, but they're a force in this market.

What Seiko, many smaller brands looking to take over for Seiko in the market for inexpensive ($50-$200) mechanicals, and G-Shock all have in common is that they offer QUALITY products, and good VALUE for the money.

But you know what? I don't watch a lot of CNBC. I'm criticizing them for running a story about the watch industry without knowing much about watches, but maybe I'm the one who's being naive here, when I insinuate that things like quality products and reasonable prices are relevant in the financial news.

The World of Watches

 As my brother said to me,

"Some people would tell you watches are anachronisms."

Those people would be entirely correct. As more and more watch enthusiasts are admitting to themselves, the only rational reason to have a watch is because you enjoy having it. And as if that weren't already enough, the watches which 999 out of 1000 hard-core watch nuts really like are mechanical watches: all power provided by an unwinding spring, the way all watches were before the first quartz watches were introduced in the 1960's. Mechanical watches keep time much less accurately than quartz watches. There actually are a few mechanical watches which keep time better than some quartz watches, but we're talking about extremely expensive mechanical watches and cheap junk quartz watches.

This is not utility. It's art. 

 

 

Women have shoes, men have watches. Sure, it's weird, but hey -- life is weird.

Smart watches, from Apple etc, don't do a thing for me. As far as I'm concerned, they're just smart phones on the wrist, and I already have a smart phone. I don't feel the need to have 2.

I've actually always been into mechanical watches. I still have 2 Timex mechanical watches made no later than the 1980's. Could be 1970's. They both stopped running long ago and old mechanical Timexes can't be repaired any more than Bic lighters can be. If memory serves, they cost $8.95 or maybe less. At Walgreen's. Actually, I have 3 Timex mechanicals: I bought an automatic Timex at a yard sale in Alaska for $2. It was made in 1979 (I looked up the serial number), and it ran for quite a while after I bought it.

But all Timexes, old or new, are crap, despite the 1 in 100,000 which runs for 40 years. The new Marlin is the first mechanical watch sold by Timex in quite a long time, and a lot of people who think they're experts on the subject of watches are going crazy over it, but they're fools. You can get 6 new mechanical Seiko 5's for the price of one new Marlin ($300 and a long waiting list, unless Timex has ramped production way, way up since the launch a couple of years ago), and each Seiko would be a far, far better watch.

But the new $300 Timex Marlin reminds all those people of the Timexes they (or their Dads or Grandpas) bought at Walgreens in the 60's and 70's for $5 or $10. Timex are evil geniuses at marketing. [PS, 22 Feb 2021: I really must apologize. It would've been so easy to check BEFORE I published. It appears that the MSRP for the Marlin has fallen to $199, that it is often on sale for less than $150, and that it is now offered in a variety of colors besides the silver which gave the original its name.]

in 1990, in Germany, I bought a mechanical pocket watch for about 60 Marks -- about $40. I don't remember the brand, but it felt really solid. It seemed like a quality product, the way well-built watches feel. Then back in the US it was stolen, and I bummed over that for a long time.

A few years ago, the only watches about which I could find any info were Swiss watches costing 4 figures and up, and pure crap costing less, and antique pocket watches which are not always very expensive to purchase and which often keep very good time when they're running, but which require a lot of expensive maintenance. Plus a lot of quartz watches, which almost never interest me. Then I happened to see a headline in a Google search saying, "The Most Affordable High-End Watch." I was skeptical, but I clicked on it, and it was an article about a Seiko 5 that cost $45. Calling it "high-end" was tongue-in-cheek -- -- but only a little bit. The article explained how this $45 watch had a lot of the qualities prized by guys who buy extremely-expensive Swiss watches and was an insane value.

So that was  how I was made aware of Seiko, and it opened up the world of watches quite a bit to me. And now I'm one of a billion a-holes trying to make a living writing nonsense about watches on the Internet.

The watch world has its own rules and customs. It's different from the car world. One example of many: vehicle manufacturers loan vehicles to periodicals, which sometimes praise the vehicles and sometimes trash them. Watch manufacturers loan (or sometimes secretly give) watches to periodicals, and in return they expect that the reviewers will not write anything bad about the watch, or only enough tiny bad remarks to keep convincing readers that these are actual reviews. There is very little honest journalism about watches. The vast majority of people posing as watch reviewers amount to paid advertisers. And all of the experts in the watch world know it. And it doesn't seem it's going to change soon. And so, sadly, since I can't bring myself to write even more nonsensically than I already do, it seems that I will NOT soon be showered with free luxury watches. (Unless I become a huge fabulous superstar.)

An Open Letter to Hodinkee re: the Hamilton Khaki Field Mechanical

You want me to get excited about the Hamilton Khaki Field Mechanical, a new item in your online shop.

And maybe I should be very excited about it, I don't know.

I know that the Hamilton 992b pocket watch, made from 1940 to 1969 in Lancaster, Pennsylvania, was an outstanding watch in its time, maybe the one truly outstanding model made by the American company (the 992 and 992a, as well as most of the other models made by American Hamilton since the late 19th century, didn't quite get it right). But 1969 was a long time ago, and I don't know squat about the current Swiss Hamilton brand except that it's one of the many brands owned by the Swatch Group. Does it really have anything in common with the old American brand except the name and the look of the dial?

And even if it has a lot in common with the old American brand, does that mean that a new Hamilton is as good as a new watch from a quality Swiss brand? Horological technology hasn't stood still for the last 50 years. A good new watch tends to be much more durable, reliable and waterproof, to name just 3 things, than a good watch made in 1969.

If all of you watch journalists didn't tell me to get excited over each and every watch you write about -- with the lone exception, as far as I know, of the Watch Snob® at askmen, who goes perhaps too far in the other direction -- then I actually might get excited about watches even more often than I already do, which is very often.

Just not about every single watch. Your recent rave review of the new overpriced mechanical piece of crap from Timex, to name one egregious example, was not helpful in this regard. You wrote that even if it's not a great watch, hey, it's only $200. For some of us, $200 is actually a lot of money which we'd rather not throw away if we can help it, especially not when $200 will get us several perfectly good mechanical watches from Seiko. And for a watch enthusiast for whom $200 really isn't a lot, it still could be $200 toward the price of something like a nice Longines, which might cost 5 or 10 times as much as the new mechanical Timex, but will look much nicer (because it's the actual item which the Timex [American English for "fake Rolex"] is trying to resemble), keep much better time, last far longer than 10 times as long as the Timex, etc, etc.

But that's the sort of advice one never gets from watch journalists, with the exception of the Watch Snob, and for all I know, he has to remain anonymous because if any of you wrote what you really think and it were known who you were, the entire industry would banish you and you'd never be able to write about any new watch again unless you bought it, and, unfortunately, not all of you can afford to spend a million Euros a year on watches, year in and year out, because life is unfair. I realize there must be reasons for the current state of affairs, and I don't think that people who write about watches are bad people.

But until some of you buck the trend and start writing in a much more straightforward manner, how will things ever change?