My watch looks almost exactly like this and I think it cost me around $40 four years ago. I like it since it can be worn in both casual and formal events without looking out of place.
Yes a 100. watch is a "cheap watch" (very cheap in fact) from the perspective of a watch as "aesthetic statement and engineering art" perspective. As a piece of accurate time keeping 100.00 is an amazingly expensive watch given you could get a $ 20 Casio that would do as well (or better) regarding the purley functional task of telling time.
Pay your money and take your choice.
I keep my phone in my pocket. It’s a pain to dig out (I often have lots of other stuff in my pockets.) Until I get a cell phone that will strap to my wrist, I’m going to keep wearing a watch.
The watch I currently have, I got from a Fred Meyer superstore, which is about the same caliber as a Target/Walmart/etc.
It was about… $35 + $10 for a leather band. Nice Tigger watch – plasticky band that I replaced, classy face with Roman numerals and a Tigger headshot.
The sundial watch idea is cool. Except I live in the Puget Sound area. Not happening. 
I carry neither a cell phone or a watch.
It’s a marvel I’m ever where I need to be.
For me:
$5 = cheap
$20 = average
over $50 = expensive
over $100 = I’m guaranteed to smash it to bits while working on something and not realize it :smack:
For reasons beyond my understanding, I’ve never accidentally smashed a cheapie watch.
I think $100 for a watch is ridiculous. For that money, I’d better be seeing gemstones on it and I want it to at least do my taxes.
Yes, you can find watches that cost a lot more than that, and those are ridiculous too. People who spend thousands on a watch are too stupid to breathe, IMHO. They probably hire someone to breathe for them.
A “cheap” watch to me would be $15 or less. “Average” would be $15-35. “Expensive but not ridiculously so” would be $35-60.
I’m going to disagree with Abbie, I think that spending thousands on a watch is alright, provided you have the money to do so without it affecting your life. If you are an executive making $400k a year, spending ten thousand on a watch isn’t all that unreasonable. From what I’ve seen, people to spend what they earn.
For me, a watch under $40 is cheap. I have a digital one that cost tmaybe twenty bucks which I wore to the beach quite often, a cheap watch that my wife got for me which is mechanical. This watch I have to wind up every day or so.
I’ve had a few fossils which cost around $70.00 but they always die on me. I have a few old pocketwatches that I got a few years ago. One is an Omega and one is a Longines. I have a Rolex as well, but that was a gift. I don’t think that I would pay that much for a watch at this point in my life.
My watch link was around $175 US. I would consider that an average to above average priced watch. Cheap would be $50 or less.
Mine is this one, $35.00. I’ve had it for about two years, and I had a similar watch for a few years before that. The straps are a bit falling apart, but it still tells time. I absolutely need to know what time it is all the time, so I need a watch that isn’t going to spontaneously die on me, but I wouldn’t be able to justify spending more than $40 for one.
The $5 watches at Walmart are cheap. Mine broke after a couple of months.
I wear a $220 St. Moritz which looks like a more expensive watch (more than once, I’ve been asked if I’m wearing a Rolex). The thing is, this watch is practical. It’s stainless steel (body and band), damned near indestructible (I’ve dropped it on the ground several times), I can and have worn it scuba diving, swimming, etc., it has a positionable bezel for timekeeping, it is dressy enough to wear professionally yet not so expensive that I’m worried about damaging or losing it.
If I needed a cheap watch, in a hurry, solely for the purpose of telling time, I’d pick up a $15 timex. After that particular day, it would probably sit in a junk drawer for the rest of its life.
A cheap watch is one that’s going to stop working after a year or so. Anything between $15 and $50 dollars is reasonable. Anything over that is a style choice–one I wouldn’t make, but then I’m sure I buy a lot of things other people would consider frivolous, so.
I don’t think I’ll ever buy a watch again, anyway. I haven’t worn the one I own ($25) in years. So really anything over $0 spent on a watch intended for my wrist is a waste.
My dad gets no end of amusement from his business associates, who (apparently) often will whisper about someone they’ve just been meeting with, “Did you see that watch he was wearing?” He, in the perfectly serviceable $25 watch he’s been wearing for many years, says nothing. The whole prestige game with suits and time pieces is just ridiculous to him.
On the other side of the equation the most expensive timepiece I’ve ever used was a bell.
Learning that I couldn’t pay attention to my classes while wearing a watch (somehow the fluid motion of the seconds passing by seemed more intriguing than translating Homer). I discarded the watch (and tried to ignore the wall clocks) and learned to rely on the clanging of the bell in the clock tower on campus to tell the time.
And it only cost me about $25000.
A year.
Wrench “I 've got a Liberal Arts Degree, would you like fries with that?” slinger
Cheap-ass watch: Vending machine style, keeps time. Probably. Price: Buck, maybe.
Cheap Watch: Digital, time, stopwatch, fragile. Price: 30-40.
Watch: My standard watch must be a G-Shock. Normally, around 60 bucks, I splurged for $75, and got one that’s solar powered. As I wore the last till the battery died, this may last longer. It’s also atomic.
Expensive Watch: There’s this lovely soviet completely mechanical submariner’s watch I’d love. $150.
Jewelry: These watches are not for keeping time. They do it exquisitely, but they are art, and for other people to recognize how tasteful you are. $1500+
I’ll stick with the soviet mechanical. It’s different enough looking to have people who look for that sort of thing be impressed by the fact they don’t recognize it.
First Christmas we were married, my husband gave me a very pretty watch that cost a couple of hundred dollars, I’m guessing. I loved it, but it finally died of rust inside - it wasn’t water resistant and we sail a lot… He replaced it with a less expensive but still, to me, pricy watch that cost over $100. I replaced it with my current $6.73 from WalMart. It keeps time, it doesn’t look too crappy, and the face is big enough that I can almost tell time without my glasses. Much as I’d like a pretty watch again, they all have very small, hard-to-see faces (at least for my old eyes) and it’d get banged up since I’m inclined to catch my watch on all sorts of things.
So, to me, a cheap watch is one that won’t run accurately, regardless of price.
After reading this thread, I’m a bit ashamed to admit that the watch I’m wearing now cost me $8000 (Aus) and I have a $6000 watch on my bedside table. I’d be the first to admit, though that for everyday purposes they don’t tell the time any better than a much much cheaper one would.
I guess if you are purely after a time-telling device $20 would work nicely, and you would never need to spend more than $100, even to get an alarm, stopwatch, multiple timezone etc
I don’t know though; even my knockabout work watch cost me $250.
Yes, I am a watch whore with more money than sense.
I used to tell time by listening to the bells as well.
Of course, this was in the U.S. Navy, and rather than shelling out 25 large a year, I was being paid for the experience, however poorly.
Um,. count me in on the $10 from Target crowd. I like Timex for work–my work is dirty, so I have a special watch for that.
I do like Fossil watches, and had a really cool one–but it did not have an illuminated face, so it was tres impractical.
The argument against using the cell phone as your watch is that if you are like me, your cell battery dies often–voila! no watch…
I buy Wal*Mart $6.95 watches and since there’s nothing cheap about me, a cheap watch must cost less than that.