Watches Are A Waste Of Money...Buy Them Anyway

  

 

    The title seems like click bait but it's a sentiment I wholeheartedly believe, and it's a belief I feel is important for readers of this blog to know and understand. Most of my opinions and views regarding horology and watch collecting find their roots in the notion that in today's society, watches are largely redundant and unnecessary expenses.  That perspective certainly hasn't stopped me from buying and collecting pieces across several brands and price points, nor do I think it should stop anyone else from pursuing the hobby however they see fit. 

    The basis for my perspective stems from several core tenants. First of these tenants is that we live in a society where we are seldomly far from a time keeping/measuring device. While at home, we use our phones to check the time, the microwave typically displays the time, the stove, our personal computers, TVs, even our smart devices will verbalize the time to us if not outright visually display it. When we wander out into the world, most people carry on them something that can keep track of time and depending on where you are, asking a stranger for the time doesn't tend to cause many issues. Mind you, all these things that keep time for us tell time as a secondary function (for the most part) and we have already paid for them. It's entirely possible that someone would rather just have the convenience of being able to look at their wrist rather than pul out there phone or hassle a stranger, which leads to my second point...and probably the one that's going to touch the most nerves.

    If someone is looking for a convenient way to check the time, realistically speaking they need not spend more than whatever the current price is for a Casio F91W, Timex Easy Reader, or other inexpensive watch.  Don't get me wrong, there are certainly situations and circumstances that justify spending more than $30 on a watch, but those have been and will typically always be the exceptions and not the rule. I like using the analogy of hammers; most people have a hammer at home, but it's probably the cheapest one they could find at the store because they know they'll use it so infrequently, or for such small jobs that ponying up the money for a nicer hammer or even a specialty hammer makes no financial sense to them. On the flip side of that, there are professionals who require special types of hammers for their job (such as framing or demolitions) and while these hammers are tailored to specific tasks, at their core they retain the same core hammer functionality. Imagine trying to put a finishing nail in with a sledge hammer; you could probably do it but it would definitely be overkill...and we both know it would look ridiculous. Yet there are people who work a standard 9-5 40-hour week, commuting from the suburbs, showing up to their office job wearing dive watches costing tens-of-thousands of dollars that can withstand being at the bottom of the Marianas Trench when all they really needed was a Timex Expedition if they wanted to feel adventurous*. 

    The last point relates to the previous point but focuses more on the actual pricing of watches in the current market. Watches are first and foremost tools for measuring time, and the vast majority of people don't need anything more than whatever the $15 quartz powered options at Walmart might be. It's not exactly a secret that a quartz powered watch keeps better time than almost any Swiss, German, or Japanese mechanical watch, regardless or whether they have COSC, METAS, or any other certifications. Quartz movements are something like +/- 10-15 seconds per month, while COSC chronometers are -4/+6 seconds a day. METAS certification offers a tighter tolerance for time drift and typically under magnetic conditions. However you would be hard pressed to find a watch with either certification that wasn't at least several hundred dollars, and more typically several thousands of dollars. So we're left with a weird conundrum where the most expensive watches aren't even the best at keeping time, which at the end of the day is really the only thing they need to do to be watches. It creates a very strange market, one that's best thought of as a continuum where at some point the watches themselves are viewed less as tools and more as art. Where that point is I can't say, and I think it's probably best that each watch collector make that determination for themselves. Even thinking of the watch market in this way creates a sort of "grey area" (not to be confused with the grey market) where the watches themselves aren't great value propositions as time measuring tools, but they also don't meet the threshold to be thought of as art. The ironic part is that the bulk of the market really sits in this "grey area". 

Most of my current collection

    None of this is to say that I don't actively participate in watch collecting, and many of my watches fall in this "grey area" I described (pictured above). Many of the posts I plan on writing later on are predicated on the ideas I've expressed here, and instead of trying to elaborate on these concepts later on, I thought it best to express them early so readers can reference back to them and understand where future opinions might originate from. And again, I don't think these views should deter anyone from pursuing watch collecting as a hobby, but maybe these views should be treated as a litmus test against whatever rationalization we want to come up with to justify buying that next watch. Because ultimately, chances are better than not that the watch you're buying is just frivolous spending on a hobby you enjoy. That in itself should be a good enough reason to buy whatever watch you want, and arguably should be your main reason to buy your next watch.  

Thanks for reading,

Dillon

*I want y'all to know that I'm wearing a Tudor Pelagos FXD as I write this, and I'm writing this before I log on to my work computer in my home office.