Many of my walls do as well. It is an optional feature, to be sure.
Well I have a MANTEL that does!! So 
I’ve been wearing a Breitling Aerospace Titanium watch almost every day for the last 12 years. It was a wedding gift from my wife. I like its simple and clear analog face, but that it also has some digital functions like stopwatch, timer, dual time zone and day/date. And, it’s not bulky too. (I bought her a nice watch, too, but she lost it and we decided not to replace it.) I also have a cheap Casio that I wear when doing hard work that might damage a watch, but pretty much every day I wear just the one watch.
Future? I learned my times tables in 1962.
Kids these days with their calculator watches…
I’m confused-Are y’all talking about the “clock bracelets” from the 80’s?
Chick chiming in: I have a Victorinox Swiss Army watch that I love. Stainless steel band, rectangular face. It’s just so clean and classic and practical. My jewelry repair guy admires it, which makes me feel good.
It was in the $200 range. I would feel intimidated by anything nicer.
I can’t wear any jewelry of any kind - watches, rings, chain/necklace - as it drives me crazy. I feel like I am in shackles.
Thus, it was ironic that the first job I got in LA was manager of a jewelry store in the Beverly Center. At least the owner knew I was never going to steal anything.
A few things I learned while working there:
Beware of “grey market” watches. Often you will indeed get the name brand watch, but not notice the watch band is NOT original. This affects the actual value quite a bit, depending upon the watch.
Many people are “battery suckers” - meaning their bodies suck the life out of a watch battery in a matter of minutes. I can remember several people buying a new watch and have the battery die before they get to the parking garage. They come back, get a new battery and, voila, it dies again in a matter of minutes. They actually have little pads you can put between the watch and the skin so this doesn’t happen.
Like cars, the minute you buy your watch and walk out the door, the value has decreased a lot! Granted, some watches hold a higher percentage of value over the long term, and (very few) actually increase in value over the years, but for the most part - never think of a watch as some kind of “investment”.
If you have a really high-end, expensive watch, and need a new battery, don’t be surprised if your local jewelry store tells you they don’t have the battery (a lie) and sends you to the manufacturer or local specialty store. Why? Well, opening those watches can be a bitch to do, and there is the danger of breaking the watch or cracking the glass or whatever - hardly worth the risk of getting $10 for the battery when you destroy a watch worth $5000 or more! As our shop was in Beverly Hills, it was not uncommon to see a watch that easily cost more than I earned in two years, and I sure as hell was NOT going to fiddle with it and change some battery!
Most of you guys are doing the right thing - buy a watch because YOU like it, and can afford it. One tip - rarely, if ever, buy someone a watch unless they have a say in the choice. It is amazing how picky people can be, and why waste the money and effort to buy something as a gift that is not what the other person wants? I can tell you that after Christmas, probably 60-70% of all watches were returned/exchanged because they were too big or too small or gold instead of silver or silver instead of gold, or had a leather armband instead of metal, etc. etc. etc. The only watches that were not returned were the cheap ones - and even then, people would come in and exchange those.
And lastly, the prices in jewelry stores have a really high mark up - for everything. So, do you research, try to go to a local jewelry “district” if there is one in your area and even do some comparison shopping online. And if the deal is too good to be true, it probably is a scam of some kind - a fake or “grey market” or whatever.
I would really like to see some scientific verification of the phenomenon.
Well, points for internal consistency, I’ll grant you that. Didn’t mean to be as defensive as my post sounded.
All I can tell you is that this happened more often than you might think. We would then sell them a tiny little pad to put between the back of the watch and their skin, and that would solve the problem.
I’d be more inclined to believe in a batch of bad batteries then I would in an ability to suck out all the power in a battery in a manner of minutes.
I like watches.
For casual wear Festina are my go to watches:
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about half dozen various models and colours. The yellow faced TdF is still my favourite of the line. All chronographs. Some with alarm and stop watch function.
For elegant dress watches I have: -
classic rectangular Bulova black face on silver
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black on black ceramic Burberry chronograph
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soon a blue on silver Burberry chronograph
For sport elegance:
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Tag Heuer Automatic S/EL, paperwhite on silver, chronograph
To wear ironically: -
Timex Weekender, grey with orange accent, indiglo.
Rolex watches never appealed to me before, but I’m finding myself giving them a second look.
My husband bought me this Breitling watch for my 40th birthday last year. I wanted a watch that had the date and second hand and a little dressy that I can take into the ocean. Omega wasn’t being made in the seamaster version I had been looking at over the years. So he chose this. It’s really nice and sporty. The white one is what I got. I’m going to hand it down to my daughter when I’m dead.
Yes, you’re right. I’m just starting out and just learning about the different proprietary “in-house” movements out there. Fascinating stuff. Also it’s a little disheartening to learn that a lot of of the $1k-$3k watches out there use the same movement sources as say… $25-$50 watches. Askmen.com’s “watch snob” went so far as to say that the rule of thumb is that if your watch costs between $1k and $3k it’s almost always not worth it since it’s caught in a no-man’s-land of luxury and run-of-the-mill.
Well hey there, it looks like you’ve hit on two of my wish-list watches: Burberry and Weekender. If you don’t mind I’d like to ask you…
- How’s the quality of the Burberry? It’s very pretty but not exactly renown watchmakers.
- I wonder about the durability of the weekender. It’s got the cloth band so I was thinking that it’d be the one that goes to the beach, up a mountain, down a river, or maybe just splashing around in a lake. I’m good to go right?
I wear an Omega Speedmaster Automatic (“reduced”, for my dainty wrists) pretty much everywhere. It’s the only jewelry I own.
Hmm I used to wear watches when I was in school, then stopped for the last 7 years, and finally resumed last year. I needed a watch to time/countdown stuff and got this: Amazon.com: Casio Men's F201WA-1A Black Resin Multi-Function Alarm Sport Watch : Clothing, Shoes & Jewelry Amazingly cheap and does everything I want. I couldn’t get an expensive one, in case it got damaged at work. The battery lasts 10 years! I’ve never even had a watch last that long. When looking for this watch, I found out the countdown timer function is surprisingly rare, even on high-end watches. My other G-Shock can store phone numbers and calculate the number of days between 2 dates, but no countdown timer :smack:
I think watches/time is interesting - the wrist is the only easily accessible location for displaying information, and we choose to display time. Not, say, position or direction or temperature.
Have you seen this thread Why do wrist watches stop working for some people? - Factual Questions - Straight Dope Message Board ? I think it’s about due for a resurrection anyway.
Haha, I would take anything the watch snob says with a big grain of salt. I mean, there’s an element of truth to a lot of the things he says – he rightly criticizes companies that case generic movements at huge markups – but he’s mostly a caricature, and I don’t think “he” is even a single distinct person.
For example, in one column he calls nylon NATO straps “a casual, preppy, all-American look that is truly divine,” but then later pans them as “those thin strips of nylon that urban hipsters are wearing on their faux vintage military watches in a hollow attempt to emulate a more genuine era” that “make you look cheap.”
I have a lot of watches. I never really set out to collect them but just kept seeing ones I liked. I don’t have an inventory but let me share some of my favorites:
When I do international travel, I try to find a watch that shows the day of the week spelled out in the local language. This turns out to be harder to find than I thought. I have one in Italian that I bought in Florence (a nice Swiss-made watch), one in French (a cheaper no-name) that I bought in Lyon, and one in Arabic (a Seiko Kinetic) that I bought in Cairo. The Seiko doesn’t have the full day spelled out, just an abbreviation; it can be switched over to show it in English as well.
Oddly, on of the top three most accurate watches I ever bought was a Mickey Mouse watch I bought in Disney World for under $50.
I have a Rolex President Oyster Perpetual DateJust that my dad left me when he died.
I’m left-handed and have an Invicta chronograph with the buttons on the left side.
I have one than runs in reverse with a mirror-image face.
I asked for scientific verification. That thread was full of nothing but anecdotes.
S’all good! I admit to becoming more utilitarian as I get older. Function over form! [sub]Think that will ever catch on?[/sub]