Sales of Luxury Watches to Younger Generations Dwindling

Fewer people alive today can actually truly afford a luxury wrist watch & the ones who can are often not interested in buying one! Chip enhanced smart jewelry like the Apple Watch popular with Gen. Y. & most Gen. X & Millennials! Grim outlook for Switzerlands "watch" intensive economy! 

Look at the price of Rolex models over time. Many of the brands that made the Swiss watch industry so powerfully profitable are unable to crack the wallets of an entire generation who have to live at home for 4 decades because of increasing basic life costs & marginalized buying power & economic losses in industrialized countries because of outsourcing & other issues created by globalization that made China the manufacturing hub of Earth, where cloning products a mainstay of sales strategies to bankrupt their competitors internationally! 

Loss of the middle glass in industrialized countries where currency inflation & high costs of living, housing, energy, make even working class people hard up for $5k to spend on a wrist ornament. Furthermore, many young people. I know cause I ask my school bus riders, do not even like or have a wrist watch, not even, dare I utter this in writing, a cheap digital CASIO- the crack cocaine of wrist watches that got me hooked at the tender young age of 7 when one was given to me as a gift my be then best friends mom & lasted until I was 21 on its original made in Japan CR2032 lithium manganese coin cell battery // 

Smart Stuff that Fails w/ Fading Sealed Batteries in 3 years! 

Gen. Y & later have smartwatches, smart rings, smart cloths, smart shoes, smartphones & are possibly the most incompetent & laziest generation of humans to roam the Earth. They do not value watches or luxury items because they do not have the funds for such extravagance, facing the proposition of being forced to live at home until they are 40 because of extreme increasing income inequality, outsourcing, insourcing, globalization, intellectual property theft, product cloning, war, poverty, corruption, human trafficking, water & air pollution, seal level rising, climate change out of control & scarcity of fresh water getting worse, while ocean & space pollution (debris) issues on the rise. Storms, cyclones, hurricanes, tornadoes, extreme droughts & flooding more intense, its not just global warming because of 8 billion people burning carbon & breathing out carbon dioxide, its all the methane emissions & other green house gases & ozone layer depleting chlorinated & fluorinated hydrocarbon gases. 

Well Healed Older People Dying Off

The wealthy boomers & their similar folks that buy expensive watches, who were able to yield a 95X ROI on basic investments for decades after WWII; able to buy homes for inflation adjusted prices that new cars & SUV's sell for now, are dwindling away from age related degeneration & dying off, leaving behind a cheated generation of people with marginalized buying power, who struggle to pay for life basics, even when they have dual incomes & no children / ask me how I know. Furthermore, many older people with the money to buy luxury items, do not, are not interested & would rather have a fancy retirement of enjoyment than an expensive wrist ornament. 

Basic Sports Watch Most Accurate

Like you know, anything beyond a basic quartz watch really a status symbol or for me something that represents advanced technology with a throwback nod to the 1704 classical mechanical jeweled wrist watch creation starting point. I consider automatic & mechanical wrist watches a future primitive reflection on the industrial revolutions that got us to where we are at today! 

Multiple Obsessions

I am also obsessed with energy & time as topics, clocks & watches & instruments from science & applied technology, motors, engines, transmissions, tooling, power tools, power sports, vehicles of all kinds, from self balancing electric scooters to the most exceptional high performance electric car, spacecraft, aircraft, boats, ships, trains, anything energetic. So a dope jeweled automatic wrist watch with a cool design sitting on my left wrist reminds me of where we came from recently with applied technology in the spirit of the book "The Lever of Riches" about the history of science & technology! 

Income Divided Future Dystopia Oncoming 

We are moving towards a future of "Haves" & "Have Nots", an elite opulent ownership class of Muti-sector monopolies like Amazon.com & all of its subsidiaries, Samsung, Google // a world with thousands of Billionaires while millions of middle class people are slipping into lower class buying power & the poor class increasing in size as their income soaked up nearly entirely to buy basic. Look at personal debt in the UK or USA for examples.

Quartz More Accurate than Automatic or Mechanical

A sad part about mechanical watches, even though I love automatics, a cheap quartz watch can obtain seconds per year accuracy & with radio reception of the atomic clock signal even better time precision or accuracy, while the best mechanical watches can gain or loose 20 minutes per year, no matter if it sports the latest silicon escapement spring & 200+ hours of reserve time, or entirely jeweled ultra efficient movement like the SWATCH Sistem51. All mechanical watches lose or gain a few seconds per day, even chronometers with Swiss certification, tuned, cleaned & oiled regularly, its friction & higher torque gearing, even with the jeweled bearings, hard to beat even an almost entirely plastic quartz watch movement in terms of precise time keeping. 

Auto-CNC vs Human Machining & Hand Finishing

Craftsmanship not really the domain of automated CNC production lines used by most companies in the watch manufacturing sector. Automatic CNC lathes made by CITIZEN Tool, means practically that anyone with deep pockets & plans & designs could start making watches. Think of the Chinese clones, super clones, ultra clones, knock offs & fakes. This means that for $68 a Chinese mega cloning company can churn out a steel & mineral glass skeletonized automatic water & sell it for around $100 & still turn a healthy profit. 

Cheap High Quality Automatic & Mechanical Movements 

Japanese watch conglomerate brand Seiko makes their exceptional 7S26 & 4R36 movements for $22 & $26 respectively. Citizen makes their eco-drive units for $18 or less // Some cheap Myota quartz movements like the 1L22 in my titanium SKAGEN can be purchased new for $8 on Esslinger. 

Super Cheap Fashion Watches

There are cheap fashion quartz watches that can be purchased for $5 on Amazon, some for even less amazingly. Branding drives a lot of the price or cost structure of valuable watch brands like ROLEX. I happen to like ROLEX because they previously sold exceptional automatics at egalitarian affordable prices to regular working people, while also making some really amazing watches for niche applications that made some very interesting marketing advertisements!