Interesting article on doing more manufacturing in America. The problem is that this is an extremely expensive and niche product.
I want slightly more expensive products made in the USA and I'll pay a premium for it, but nothing astronomical.
If I can pay 20% more on coffee and chocolate to make sure the farmers were paid a living wage, we can do similar things in the US. I understand that US wages are much higher and make this more difficult, but it would be a step in the right direction. Globalism has brought down prices and made many things very cheap and affordable, but at what cost?
I'd like comments from anyone with more understanding of the issues.
Just wondering how the economics of us manufacturing handles global logistics. Can a product made in the USA ship to the rest of the world at a price competitive to those made in China?
I honestly don't know the answer to this. If it's "yes", then bring on us production!
I ask because I'm in Australia, and we're a wierd case when it comes to global logistics.
Textile manufacturing is coming back to South Carolina, USA as it's cheaper to produce in SC than in China. Along with favorable trade agreements they're able to access/use South American markets for cheaper as well.
There are fewer jobs than in the past in part due to automation.
The more a factory produces the more automation pays off: it takes a big up front investment to pay for the machines, but once the machines are working it costs very little to make more.
Shipping has a bunch of other issues. Wars, border issues, weather, [long list skipped] all interrupt shipping, and the farther something needs to go the more likely it is one of these interrupts your shipment. Everything that depends on that is in turn disrupted.
Cars are best assembled near where they are used because when fully there is a lot of empty space (the cabin). The alternator for that car can be made pretty anywhere, it is small and dense and so shipping costs are not high. Most other products have elements of each along the way.
Large companies often have a large department dedicated to mapping out logistics. It is no easy to make sure that all the parts needed to build their widget arrive on time.
It depends; I believe it works really well for e.g. consumer electronics because of the value per volume, but as another commenter mentioned, not so much for cars. Car parts on the other hand are much more efficiently packaged, so for example Tesla has an assembly plant in Tilburg, NL.
Are these the funny numbers that use intel's massive profits multiplied by a moore's law value adjustment factor to hide the decline of everything else?
Watches are a weird market in that a $30 one from Walmart keeps better time than pretty much any watch from a luxury brand costing $5000 or more. $500 is way more than the average person will spend on a watch but once you get into the watch world a little bit you start to become numb to prices and all of a sudden $500 seems dirt cheap. I don't think this is targeted to a normal person, but the type of people who already own tens of thousands of dollars in watches and will buy this as a novelty with out even blinking. It's a weird and very rich (elitist) market.
> I don't think this is targeted to a normal person, but the type of people who already own tens of thousands of dollars in watches and will buy this as a novelty with out even blinking. It's a weird and very rich (elitist) market.
Yeah, and this "weird and very rich" market pretty much exclusively steers clear of anything that says "Quartz" on it. Hell, even state of the art mechanical movement like Seiko Spring Drive suffered from being associated with Quartz watches, even despite the fact that it had nothing to do with them. So there goes that theory.
More likely this looks like some executive at Timex finding some Shinola garbage at some local mall and going "Do that, just replicate whatever these guys are doing!" without first asking themselves "Is this business model even viable or profitable?"
> Hell, even state of the art mechanical movement like Seiko Spring Drive suffered from being associated with Quartz watches, even despite the fact that it had nothing to do with them.
They have a quartz oscillator controlled by an integrated circuit! Replacing a motor with a generator is neat, but the real trick is that there's no way for mechanical imperfections to affect the rate, making it easier to manufacture.*
* Caveat being that I haven't made them, power reserve is the real game there, and they don't seem to be cutting corners.
The thing with Spring drive is that Quartz oscillation in it while used for the same purpose (time keeping) is used in an entirely different fashion. Being a mechanical watch admirer I consider it more in the realm of automatics than in the realm of mechanical watches. I wouldn't give the same distinction to Seiko Kinetic though.
And that's a standard quartz; the specs say -10 to 20 s/month.
Still ~10x more accurate than a mechanical watch, but not ~200x more accurate as thermocompensated ones are (as mentioned in the message you were replying to).
It can be elitist, but honestly what clothing accessory market doesn't have that cohort? There's so many decent options under $1000 it's insane (a little research to avoid upsold Chinese crap like MVMT Watches is necessary though).
I have a little sympathy for him but not very much. Sheep farming has a terrible impact on the environment, huge areas of land where they graze are barren. It only exists due to subsidy, one of the few benefits of Brexit is we may be able to kill it off completely once out of the CAP.
A lot of the competition in the UK comes from New Zealand lamb where they have a better climate for raising sheep. It doesn't have much to do with industrial farming, it's more about their ability to grow grass year round.
>Globalism has brought down prices and made many things very cheap and affordable, but at what cost?
That depends whether you consider an American job more valuable than a Chinese one. America has the wealth to provide a safety net, it's not the fault of globalism that it doesn't.
> America has the wealth to provide a safety net, it's not the fault of globalism that it doesn't.
The US has an enormous safety net. What are you referring to? On total net social spending, the US ranks just below France at the very top in the OECD, with 30% of all economic output directed at that. For comparison, Sweden and the UK are at 24%. For strictly public-based social spending, the US is ranked with New Zealand and just below the UK, and ahead of Canada and Australia.
On strictly public social welfare spending as a share of the economy, the US ranks in front of: Canada, Australia, Iceland, Netherlands, Israel, Switzerland, Ireland.
At the rate US public social welfare spending is increasing, it'll surpass the UK and Japan in the coming decade.
Most of the total governmental budget in the US (local, state, federal) goes to its various social programs whether entitlements or traditional welfare state spending. For one increasingly large example, the huge entitlement programs in the US involve very large welfare funds transfers to prop up the social safety nets.
Just the taxpayer funded healthcare systems for free healthcare services (mostly for the poor and disabled) in the US cost $700-$800 billion now when all levels of spending are accounted for.
$7.6 trillion in total government spending. Roughly 3/4 of that is social program spending directed at various safety nets.
The US increased its Federal budget by 9% most recently. That's something like a $330-$350 billion increase in one year, at just the Federal level. The vast majority of that is social safety net spending increases.
While most developed nations are aggressively restraining their welfare states at this point due to cost, the US continues to expand its welfare state (thus the permanent near trillion dollar budget deficits that are looming, of which ~20% is excessive military spending and ~10% is recent tax cuts (some of which resets), the rest, roughly 70%, is to fund social programs).
The myth that the US doesn't have any social safety net really needs to die given the trillions of dollars the US spends every year on it.
You can scream that the US spends trillions on safety nets until you are blue in the face (Or until they line us up against the wall). In reality, unless you make less than $17500 or are older than 65, you don't really feel any of it. When Americans travel or talk to Europeans they learn that our health care, college, worker protections and consumer protections are absolute shit in comparison. This leads to wanting to change the system to work for us... Not focusing on how much we already spend. If anything, the fact that we spend so much on social programs per capita is great news, because a lot of the money is already there.
I'm also willing to pay a premium for American made stuff, but sometimes the price difference is extreme. Right now I'm in the market for a wood pellet smoker, and all the common, Chinese made ones (Traeger, Pit Boss, GMG, Rec Tec, etc) are in the $350-$500 range for the size I'm interested in, while all the American made ones (Yoder, MAK, Blaz'n, Royall, etc) are $1000 plus.
These things are 100-200 lb steel things, so it makes me wonder if this is what those tariffs were about, or if it's the labor, quality, or what.
Your 20% markup is one thing, but 2x or 3x the price is hard to swallow.
Agree completely. However I’m pretty sure theres a cartel (ETA?) for automatic Swiss movements that Timex doesn’t want to cater to. Which basically leaves this watch in the “overpriced fashion” category. And they probably don’t want an Asian movement cuz that appears cheap (although there’s some good ones out there).
I think it’d be awesome to see a USA made movement again in this price point, but I’m not holding my breath.
I am also not sure if they actually want to promote American craftsmanship or just want to sell cheap stuff while taking advantage of ”made in America”.
Konrad Damasko is basically just a guy working in his garage, and he managed to do it.
Someone above mentioned Shinola which is, sadly typical of "US products" -basically they're LARPing at "quality" -selling to the type of people who pay $100 for a trip to a 1950s looking barber shop, or who go on expensive trips up the coast on the Jeremiah O'Brien liberty ship.
ETA is owned by Swatch group, which owns a ton of watch brands[1], including Hamilton, which I would say competes head-to-head with the most Timex pieces (at least in the $500 price range).
There are other Swiss automatic movement makers though, like Sellita (the SW200 is basically an ETA 2824[2]).
Not always. Timex also recently released a reissue of their 1965 Marlin for $200 which is a manual wind watch, this time using a Seagull movement rather than what the original used.
I got a domed sapphire Hamilton hand wind for just over a hundred. And don't ignore used. My favorite was just over 50 USD but it's from the late 60s. Domed acrylic hand winds are the best.
...but then with everything that has happened politically, my one purchased has remained that; I don't have a real good logical reason for not continuing my collection.
But I started out well (I think) - I ended up getting this particular one (not from this shop - I found it on Ebay):
It looks horribly crafted to me. Look at the close-up of the finishing on the hands here: https://assets.bwbx.io/images/users/iqjWHBFdfxIU/ibkZQA68NpX... . Look at the uneven thickness of the hour hand, the roughness of the finish around the screw, the uneven application of paint on the font. This is shoddy at best. A $50 automatic Seiko has more finesse than that. Don't even get me started on a completely generic fashion watch dial design and the scratch magnet bezel.
The question is why? It's a $20 movement in a poorly finished case. The most important part of the watch isn't made in the USA. It's a $50 product being sold for $500.
Further, it completely misses the point of what made Timex famous to begin with; excellent quality at a low price. This is neither.
For $500, they are going up against some vastly superior products. For example, this cannot hold a candle to any similarly priced Seiko.
The price is, frankly, insulting. It would be an iffy sell at $50, but at $500, this has complete failure written all over it.
Conspiracy theory: deliberately fail in order to demonstrate that “Made in America” doesn’t work so they’ll get less criticism about manufacturing elsewhere.
More realistic: fleece suckers who think “Made in America” make it worth spending $500 for a $50 watch.
Or, you know, taking advantage of some tax breaks and benefits. It's not like factory jobs are for other races and countries, and Americans should just sit back and solely devote themselves to pure ideas and entrepreneurship.
>More realistic: fleece suckers who think “Made in America” make it worth spending $500 for a $50 watch.
Most $500 watches are worth way less, even $50, so nothing special about this (regardless of where they are made).
Besides, getting domestic jobs for people is still worth something. Those laid off factory workers of old aren't gonna "reinvent" themselves anytime soon and get into Silicon Valley, but if they could get a new factory job that's something - and beats homelessness or low-end shitty gigs like Uber.
Plenty of great stuff is made in the US. I’d rather we focus on making things we’re good at, rather than taking random stuff, slapping “Made in America” on it, and hoping someone is willing to pay a premium for that text.
>I’d rather we focus on making things we’re good at, rather than taking random stuff, slapping “Made in America” on it, and hoping someone is willing to pay a premium for that text.
Why not make everything you can make? Would there be a problem is the US manufactured CPUs and phones as opposed to sending them to be made in China/Korea/Taiwan/etc?
To outsource externalities (e.g. environmental costs)? Or to stifle any labor demands (by moving your production to wherever you like any time they are raised somewhere)?
Are there laws about the "Made in" claim? That is, could they realistically have the movement and case and everything made abroad, then only do the final assembly in the US and earn the "Made in the USA" brand?
Yes. In 2016 the FTC stopped Shinola from claiming their watches were "made" in America. Much more accurately they were "assembled" in America (Detroit) from foreign parts [1].
I entirely agree with the FTC, their claims were dishonest. As a point of comparison, Switzerland regulates what percentage of the watch must be Swiss before it can be claimed to be "Swiss," but it's not an easy question. For example, with completely made up numbers, low wage Chinese manufacturer sells mostly finished movement for $20 that required 4 hours to make. High wage Swiss assembler puts in another hour, at a cost of $40. Total time is 5 hours, 80/20 Chinese/Swiss and total cost is 60, 33/67 Chinese/Swiss. From time perspective, it's a Chinese watch, but from cost perspective it's Swiss.
They already are. Their web site claims that they're using a Swiss movement. They're silent on where the case and other parts are being manufactured, but I'd guess that the movement accounts for a good portion of the production cost.
>it completely misses the point of what made Timex famous to begin with; excellent quality at a low price.
Brands change, particularly fashion brands. Many high-end brands become debased and low end brands slowly scale up in quality to become high-end a decade later. Timex doesn't need to make a lot of 500 dollar watches because they wont sell a lot of 500 dollar watches.
It might however move the perceived value of the brand outside of the discount bin, and earn some cheap goodwill advertising while it does so.
All good points, but they should have selected a non novelty grade movement to start out with. Landfills and warehouses are filled with this type of corporate vanity product that failed to deliver.
Beyond that, Timex is a brand name relegated to disposable $20 watches. Trying to fluff up their mind share with a poorly made and laughably priced product is not going to work out for them.
The point of this watch is that it's assembled in America with decent labor conditions. I think that's probably why they went with a Swiss movement rather than one from Seiko or Citizen. Perhaps Seiko's environmental and labor practices are part of the reason their watches cost less.
> Brands change, particularly fashion brands. Many high-end brands become debased and low end brands slowly scale up in quality to become high-end a decade later.
My wife and I have noticed this kind of trend with fast food. At one time, certain fast-food brands were considered "higher-tier" than other fast-food brands, but over time, they have swapped places (in some cases more than once).
The only ones which seem to "stay where they are" have been McDonalds (not for trying, though) and Taco Bell (they know their spot and market - smart choice, I'd say).
The others seem to migrate around, depending on the market, etc.
no one can win on seiko at this price point and in terms of hardware. but that doesnt matter much. have a look at shinola. they sold 700$ watches "made in detroit" that are quartz movement and they made so much and it worked so well that they are now selling automatic movements. don't hate on the made in america it is a brand in itself.
I'm a periodic Timex buyer, and I've been wondering for the last few years if they've noticed what I've noticed: "High end" Timex watches tend to sell. They have legs.
This is just based on watching both pricing and availability at watch retailers. So when earlier this year I saw an attractive new Timex design listed at a bit of a stretch price considering it's a Timex, I decided to buy it. I own other reliable and discontinued Timex watches that never reappeared on the market. Nothing _really_ high end though--and for that reason I think they noticed the room for additional profit.
It's getting a bit worn unfortunately, as a word, but IMO good "design" still moves customers and this moves products.
I'm glad I bought my new Timex (nothing super high-end, just around to $100 but not a design I had seen before) and I bought it from a watch retailer who up until recently refused to carry them. Something's changing.
Looking at the $500 price, a lot of watch collectors look for that thing that the other guy doesn't have, which also gives them brand nostalgia, etc. They know that when it's gone, it's usually gone. And $500 is nothing to a lot of these guys. They will spend $500 on a pocket knife that stays in their pocket all day.
>The question is why? It's a $20 movement in a poorly finished case. The most important part of the watch isn't made in the USA. It's a $50 product being sold for $500.
Most watches are like that. In the high end, it's $1000 product being sold for $30000.
>Further, it completely misses the point of what made Timex famous to begin with; excellent quality at a low price.
They already do well in that market. It's not enough for them, they want a market with better margins.
It's not like they're the only: Casio G-shocks are now having a "high end" brand, selling $100-$200 worth of watches for 1 to several K dollars. There's a basic square (the classic 6510 and co mechanism that sells for 30-50$) that goes for $800 just because it's now in stainless steel.
That's quite hillarious, $800 Casio G-Shocks and $500 Timex watches. A Tissot T Touch is priced in that range, why would anyone get a Casio or Timex for the price of a Tissot?
Probably because at least with the Casio and Timex you know you're getting something overpriced openly.
With the Tissot you're just getting a pretentious overpriced crap (whether it has this or that custom movement, the margins are still stacked way against the buyer).
Your typical $30k watch has way more than $1k of highly skilled hand labor that's gone into it. Agreed that the component prices don't add up to close to $30k, but throw in all the other overhead typical of manufacturing and selling luxury goods, including labor, advertising, servicing, maintaining physical stores, etc., and the profit margin on those watches is gonna less than, say, selling Internet ads.
Shinola is stuffing $100 movements into cases that are frankly completely oversized for them and selling them for $1000+. I guess Timex wants in on the action. Don't underestimate the power of marketing hype.
Unfortunately a lot of my extended family has gotten into Shinola watches because of familial origins in Detroit. At least they're still significantly cheaper than Rolexes while still doing a passable job of telling time, even if their resale value suffers?
I used to have a fun 24 hour analog quartz watch that I stopped wearing after I got a ~$150 Garmin fitness watch. This thing always tells perfect time because it syncs off my phone (including time changes from traveling or DST), has a GPS tracker for runs and bike rides, can measure heart rate, and pairs via Bluetooth and reads me incoming text messages.
It's crazy how, at much cheaper price, you get so much more functionality with a smart watch. And it's even better at being a watch! It just doesn't look as nice.
Aren't watches mostly fashion type products anyway and their value sort of fungible anyhow?
I don't doubt there are plenty of really cool watches out there that are "worth" $500.... but generally they seem to be fashion products where even the price seems pretty disconnected with the actual product / utility.
Things are worth what people are willing to pay for them. There are lots of watches worth orders of magnitude more than $500. If you can buy a $10,000 Rolex today and sell it tomorrow for $11,000 it was worth it, right?
Plus, nobody is buying a $50,000 Patek because it solves the problem of showing what time it is. It's about appreciation of artistry and craftsmanship and letting other people know that you are the kind of person to wear a Patek.
Is a BMW in your opinion "worth" the same as a Kia then? A BMW generally has more complex engineering, and a more "luxury" look.
A Kia works exactly the same at driving, so therefore with your logic, it's worth exactly the same.
High-end watches are extraordinarily complex machines, and yes, generally have a "luxury" look which may be un-necessary in your eyes. Though, the market for "incognito" luxury movements within cheap watches is way too small to be sustainable.
Watches are somewhat unique in that expensive mechanical versions perform their function more poorly than cheap quartz watches (with the exception of Zenith and maybe others).
Yes, that is true, quartz are better at keeping time, though mechanical watches are still better at measuring time. Astronauts for example are required to use Omega Speedmaster mechanical watches on spacewalks (which at it's cheapest is still about $8000), and it was the watch used during Apollo 13 to time the engine burn (which required great accuracy).
Quartz watches "tick" only once per second. Mechanical watches move generally 6ish times a second, causing a perpetual movement. This makes them better for measuring things in fractions of seconds than a quartz movement.
If you are talking about a sweep second hand, there are plenty of quartz movements that do that.
If you go for digital quartz, you can get 1/100 second accuracy in a $10 watch.
The longer you time something, the worse the mechanical watch is going to be. Most of them gain or lose several seconds every day.
Zenith is the only manufacturer that I know does significantly better than this, but that particular movement is pretty rare and extraordinarily expensive.
>The question is why? It's a $20 movement in a poorly finished case. The most important part of the watch isn't made in the USA. It's a $50 product being sold for $500.
Because they saw Shinola doing the same thing, which proved that 'Made in the USA' on a watch is all it takes for suckers to pay premium for a mediocre product.
Questions of cost and "why" apply broadly to the whole category of watches. Up until the late 70s, watches were tools to keep you from being late.
Since then, you've been able to get a cheap, reliable watch for next to nothing. Quartz movement, combined with mechanization of production, ensured that. The whole industry had to adapt to making watches themselves sort of an aesthetic statement, not a practical tool to keep you from being late.
At this point, any watch costing more than $25 is itself an aesthetic piece. Part of that aesthetic is where and how it's made. There's probably a market for watches made in Antarctica because of whatever sense of taste that "story" appeals to.
”Up until the late 70s, watches were tools to keep you from being late.”
That’s not true at all. There have always been a lot of reasons to wear a watch that have nothing to do with getting the time. Cheap movements expanded the market to the low-end, but didn’t really change the reasons that people buy watches.
Fundamentally, watches are jewelry. That’s been true forever, but it also isn’t something that can be reduced to “aesthetics” alone (for example, people pay handsome premiums for better mechanical movements, even though it has no impact on the look of a watch. The idea of wearing a well-crafted, tiny mechanical device is itself an attractive prospect.)
It’s the equivalent of people who talk about Windows machines being “better deals” than Apple machines. After all, they both flip bits, right? If all you do is fixate on the function, everything becomes a commodity.
People pay handsomely for better mechanical movements, but that's still an aesthetic choice. The world's most accurate mechanical movement is just not going to be as accurate as a mid-range quartz movement. Paying a premium for something that's mechanical because it's mechanical is the epitome of an aesthetic choice. It's not at all like the Mac vs PC choice, which might have some aesthetics involved, but is still about support, ease of choice, brand reputation, and of course, technical details.
Maybe watches have always been somewhat aesthetic, and while they were made to be pretty in the 1920s, they really did exist as timepieces first and foremost. Now a mechanical watch's main function is the way it makes you feel.
Who is supposed to be wearing these wristwatches? I can comprehend the use case for wrist-worn electronics devices that do more than just tell time, but we have mostly gone back to pocketwatches now--pocketwatches with a rounded-rectangular form factor that also function as telephones, cameras, notepads, maps, compasses, calculators, game consoles, and televisions.
As adornments go, I also think that handing over $500 to a local jewelry artist would get you a better bracelet.
The mechanical-movement wristwatch is obsolete. Bring on the Pip-Boy.
> Original quartz watches are still working, are they not?
Barely, and replacement parts (and sometimes even appropriate batteries) can be extremely hard to source.
> Not having any moving parts
Electronics are brittle and do degrade over time. As I observe them, they last about 20 to 30 years realistically. Early mass produced commercial quartz watches are prized collector items, whereas mechanical watches from before the quartz revolution are easy to find in perfect working condition.
Technically, quartz piezoelectric-movements do vibrate.
Equally technically, non-functional mechanical-movement watches from before piezoelectric-movement are also easy to find in garbage heaps and bankrupted watch-repair shops, and the "perfect working condition" of the functional ones are possibly a result of Ship-of-Theseus-style maintenance. Note that mechanical timepiece repair is a somewhat less viable business than it once was, and able to support only a tiny fraction of workers as it once did.
Quartz watches have fewer individual repair parts available, because the typical repairs are to replace the battery and to replace the entire movement. Now, it is reasonable to consider the repair part for a broken quartz watch to be a newly-manufactured watch, and the repair procedure is to remove the broken watch from your wrist and replace it with the working new one.
Mechanical watches are certainly useless when removed from Earth, whereas electronic timepieces may be reprogrammed to display the numbers of a different timekeeping convention.
I seriously don't think I can find a $500 bracelet with a good aesthetic appeal I'd like. Part of the reason is that I like moving things (with a mechanism), and would dislike skeuomorphism in bracelets.
Watch manufacturers sometimes do things like this to limit demand when they aren't ready to scale production, but still want the buzz of launching. Launch a successor at a much lower retail and discontinue the original reference, which collectors may care enough about for its historical significance to keep the price of the original high on the used market.
I'm guessing their strategy of engaging non-watch companies to supply parts (and it shows) has something to do with the price and likely low production volumes it will receive.
But I agree–the hands look terrible even for a $50 watch, and those movements are certainly costing Timex less than $10 each. The only value here is the story, and nice (if underfinished) brass caseback insert. The rest of it is positively terrible at that retail price.
It's for the hipster/nativist niche. Automatic (probably Swatch). Made in America (in big letters on the face, but the movement is ETA/AXIA/Ronda or other Swiss maker).
I guess premium-ish-but-not-really PBR is next, brewed by some previously "craft" brewer gobbled up by a mutual parent company. Oh man. A little googling reveals the horrifying plausibility of that.
As the watch connoisseurs have pointed out it's not really a moderately priced premium product. It's a cheap product with pumped-up margins so it can get internally green lighted because the margin contribution will be enough to move the needle a bit.
You see a lot of the same in clothing e-commerce: Stuff that's not unique, not especially high quality, and shockingly expensive for what you get because it hit a hip vibe.
I’m a developer and a total watch nerd (mechanical watches). Partly what attracts me to watches is the micro-mechanics, but also how it’s a mix of artistry, craftmanship and old technology and know-how. I often post on Instagram, please have a look and hope you like the content: https://www.instagram.com/openworked/
Not so much because I care that people have fake watches, more because the posts point out the subpar quality of the fakes and how you can distinguish the real from the fake, often in quite a bit of detail.
I don't understand this watch. It has a Ronda cal.6004.D movement which is a Swiss Quarts movement. Not that the Ronda movement is a bad movement, there are just so much better options out there for the same price. Why not go with an ETA? And if you're going to advertise that your watch has a "Swiss Movement", why go for a Quartz movement over an Automatic or Hand-Wind.
On top of all that, it's $500. Now $500 for a watch isn't that much in the watch world considering how many watches are $1-10K+, but compare this watch to a Seiko SARB. The SARB has 100m water resistance, a 50hr automatic movement, and comes in at >$100 cheaper.
Unless you're a Timex fanboy or collector, I really can't recommend this watch over other similar options.
I loved my first timex. I lost it in a swimming pool in Les Eyzes, in france in the early 1970s. It lost 10min a month minimum and I had a NATO watch strap which stank of stale boy sweat.
I bought a replacement in the 1980s. It was fantastic. It was identical, lost the same ten minutes a month, had the same sweaty stank on the NATO strap. I lost it in a swimming pool in Swiss Cottage London.
I bought the Timex Watch Will Farrell wears in the film, the ironman. It was fantastic. Somehow, I haven't managed to lose it in a swimming pool. Unfortunately, indiglo kind-of sucks, and it lost its alarm function, and I had to move to another watch
(I went J Springs, and I love it and it loses 10 minutes a month...)
I want slightly more expensive products made in the USA and I'll pay a premium for it, but nothing astronomical.
If I can pay 20% more on coffee and chocolate to make sure the farmers were paid a living wage, we can do similar things in the US. I understand that US wages are much higher and make this more difficult, but it would be a step in the right direction. Globalism has brought down prices and made many things very cheap and affordable, but at what cost?
I'd like comments from anyone with more understanding of the issues.
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