I believe you but since a Big Mac meal at McDonald’s near me costs $14 an automatic watch made in China and shipped to the US and then shipped to Chicago for $20 (with a profit margin) seems near impossible. The economics of these things are beyond my ability to understand.
Interesting. I have an automatic (Tissot) and it absolutely cannot be wound manually. (If it can I’d be shocked…happily but also feel very stupid).
I would be pretty damn surprised if there was no provision for manual winding. The Tissot website even tells you to manually wind your automatic watch to get it started.
How to rewind your watch depending on the movement type:
Automatic winding
- Turn the crown clockwise until you feel resistance. Usually, 40 to 80 turns of the crown are necessary.
- Exception for the Swissmatic movement: if manually winded, the crown has to be turned anticlockwise.
Wow…TIL! Thanks!
I will say manipulating the winding stem on the Tissot kinda sucks. It’s very stiff. Winding it forward 12 hours kinda sucks (to get the date back on midnight and not on noon). 40-80 tunrs…oof.
Will give it a try though. Thanks again!
With the caveat that the below is a quartz battery watch, and thus, not exactly what the OP is asking about:
My father is 92, and his eyesight is not awesome anymore (even with glasses). He has several analog wristwatches, but they have slim hands, and no numbers on the dial, so they’ve become hard for him to read.
I just bought him this Timex quartz “Easy Reader” watch, for about $45 (I bought the “stainless steel / silver” variety). The dial has large numbers, thicker, high-contrast hands (black on white background), and it has the Timex “Indiglo” back lighting, making it easier to read in dimmer lighting conditions.
If the OP isn’t able to find a traditional mechanical watch in his desired price range, he might consider something like this.
I googled “self-winding watch,” selected “shopping,” and found a plethora of analog no-battery watches available. The ones in th OP’s stated price range were on Temu and Etsy, so caveat emptor.
OP is a she.
Oh, heck. My apologies!
That is very much like mine, only I have white numbers on a black background, and a strap with a buckle. Regardless, I like it. The numbers are big enough to see without my glasses, and the hands contrast with the face, so it is easy to read. Plus the Indiglo helps in the dark.
I’d recommend it.
Any Seiko with the automatic 7S26 movement can not be wound manually - you have to shake it to get it started. Colloquially known as the “Seiko Shuffle”. After decades, this movement is finally being phased out in favor of the 4R36 and other movements, which are based on the same architecture but can hand-wind and hack.
I have several 7S26-powered watches in my collection. In terms of specs they’re not “good” by any stretch of the imagination compared to more modern offerings but they have their charm.
Seiko Spring Drive. Hybrid of an automatic and a quartz. It has a rotor and a mainspring like any automatic. The mainspring drives a generator which powers an electric motor to drive the hands. It also powers an integrated circuit and quartz oscillator (which monitors the speed of the hands) and an electromagnetic brake. The circuit, based on feedback from the oscillator, controls the brake to slow the hands down to keep them at the correct time.
When you wind up a stopped Spring Drive the hands go crazy fast for about 2 or 3 seconds until the circuit and brake kick in and slow them down to the proper speed. It’s cool to see.
The Spring drive is used almost exclusively in the top Seiko sub-brands (Grand Seiko and Credor), but it was used in a handful of regular Seiko’s as well. I have one in a Seiko dive watch. It runs a half a second fast. Per week. It’s a phenomenal piece of kit.
Seiko also used to make “Kinetic” watches, where they had a rotor like an automatic, but the rotor powered a generator which charged a capacitor, which then powered a standard quartz movement. These are not made anymore (to my knowledge) - they were complicated (tended to break), the capacitors had a finite life meaning they had to be changed (just like a battery but more involved), and modern batteries last a lot longer. Modern solar-powered quartz watches have basically taken this niche.
That was what powered my Seiko 5 I mentioned above. Worked great for a few years, then it didn’t.
They’re a crapshoot, that’s for sure. I had a Seiko 5 that ran great for about a year then started going all wonky. I could have swapped out the movement but I kind of lost interest in the piece and sold it. I have 2 other 7S26 watches - both over 10 years old and they’re still running great.
Amazing! I wonder who thought leaving out the manual winding works was a good idea? In any case, the Tissot website link I sent WAM specifically says not to shake the watch to start it. Fun!
Cost-cutting; the watches were meant to be very affordable. Also less parts to break.
IANA mechanical watch person.
But I’ll WAG that 2 or 3 or 6 days of watch energy stored in a manually windable coil spring is by far the highest stress part of that watch. And the escapement to manage that energy release in a controlled fashion is also exposed to high stress, at least while the watch is fully wound.
Contrast that with a self-winder that only stores maybe 18 hours of energy. The mainspring and escapement there can be correpondingly smaller and more lightly built.
thank you! I mean, you can see my …oh, never mind. I’m a male Robin, apparently. 
Eh…
Sure, as a percentage I guess you are correct but mechanical watches run on very, very little stored energy. Those springs store energy of course but they are very delicate things. If that energy was all spent in one go on hitting you I’d be surprised if you barely noticed or even noticed at all.
That’s why little watch batteries can last 5+ years. Watches take very, very little energy to operate.
I came within an inch of buying a Grand Seiko Snowflake spring drive watch some years ago for around $2,500. I didn’t. Looking now and they are $10,000.
Kicking myself.
MSRP on the GS Snowflake is about $7K new from an authorized dealer. You can easily get them for $4K-$5K on the gray market. Not quite 2.5K but not bad either (as luxury watch prices go anyway - of course it’s insane from any objective measure).