Are Rolex Watches Cheaper at an Airport?
Posted4 months agoActive4 months ago
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Luxury GoodsDuty-Free ShoppingRolex Watches
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Luxury Goods
Duty-Free Shopping
Rolex Watches
The article discusses whether Rolex watches are cheaper at airports, with the community questioning the value of luxury brands and duty-free shopping in general.
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"Duty free" is a huge trap. I haven't looked at watches (I will never understand the desire for a Rolex or other 4-figure watch), but I once checked out a duty free liquor store. I spot-checked a few bottles I could get at home and found that the "duty free" store was easily 25-50% more than what I'd pay at home.
[0]https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Betteridge%27s_law_of_headline...
A Rolex certainly goes beyond the threshold in many countries, but maybe the thought is the buyer might be willing to risk "smuggling" it in.
Makes you really think where have these prices gone.
The Rolexes you can buy on spot are typically lower (undesirable) models.
otoh it's now only x3 the price I would have bought it for, and I probably would have worn it to death, so maybe it was money well not-spent.
I wouldn’t have realized you could negotiate price on anything sold in the airport. I didn’t know you could negotiate on new, high end watches in general, though, to be honest.
And yeah, I’ve never understood the people who buy duty free booze, etc. The prices never looked particularly good, and it’s going to be another thing to wrangle and schlep home when you land. I always assumed it was targeted at people from other countries with higher prices.
...I joke, but in Thailand, where driving schools can administer the driving tests, not just the DMV, people do shop around for driving schools for various reasons.
(It's anecdotal, but: During my brief time in big-name department store retail, one of my duties was operating a cash register. All cashiers there were able to discount anything by up to, IIRC, 30% -- without getting any special approval. It just took a few button presses.)
Services, though, were very flexible. Nobody was looking at the receipt, just the work order. 80% of something beats 100% of nothing every time.
No ever asked me, but I probably would have tried if I knew it was under 5%.
Presumably you come from a country with low taxes on alcohol.
Come to Norway, but do yourself a favour and stock up on duty free fags and booze first.
Am I perceiving things horribly wrongly?
Where I live, you are a chump if you pay the sticker price - getting a valuable thing for much less than that is one of the indicators of how people judge your status. The fact that brands try to control pricing only makes the "game" more interesting.
You made money and you've been wearing rolex all the time.
Being paid €500 per year for wearing rolex vs. speding money for wearing casio easy choice if you can afford it ... btw. I do wear casio too and I love it - because yeah to keep time you buy casio.
It's fine to wear it for the purpose of being a status symbol, but I just don't buy that its anything but.
Some reasons I've been told why people buy luxury watches, outside of the status symbol ones:
1. As discussed, good watches tend to hold / increase their price as time goes on. This leads to the second point: people who can afford to buy a fancy watch likely have a lot of money in mutual funds/other financial instruments anyway, so a Rolex becomes "diversification" for less-rich people and a curio for the more-rich
2. People want an heirloom to give to pass on to the next generations. I've seen watches three-four generations old. In some circles, the older the watch, the more prized it is; a favorite grandchild might get your best watch. It represents the family's continued success
3. "If you are attacked on the street, you want to be able to give something to the robber so he can leave you unharmed" (never mind the fact that you probably got robbed _because_ you wore the Rolex)
Personally speaking I find many of the justifications hilarious, but this kind of thinking regarding luxury has been going on for centuries, so what do I know.
Now if I have to choose a watch and I can make a choice between a losing item and likely winning item I'll take the likely wionning one. Perhaps it's like crypto or mutual funds but I'd rather buy crypto than flush money down the toilet.
So no you don't buy a watch for investment, there are better investments. No you don't buy it a fashion item to get time - I already have precise time on my phone. Not into wathches - all good. You don't like to dress nice, perhaps you live in a big city where nobody cares - no problem.
But let's not argue I'm not wise for not buying "precise time" Casio over Rolex because I have 8k on my wrist I paid 4.5k for and I've been wearing beautiful watch for 7 years now :) And yes there are better investments and million better things to buy - I could drive $2k car, I could make best investments and so on and end up like this guy: https://www.reddit.com/r/Frugal/comments/10ec45k/i_think_i_r...
It's all simply a point of view + making the best out of your money. At the end of the day it's just paper.
As a side note, my cheap, but very well calibrated, mechanical Seiko keeps time as well as a couple of cheap quartz (100% original) Casios I have. It's running at 13 seconds of error accumulated over the last 125 days (almost to the hour), which gives 104 ms of drift per day. The two Casios have ~85 ms and ~120 ms of error per day.
So you're not even paying for insane accuracy or anything like that — thanks to modern engineering, it is available in a mechanical that costs tiny fractions of a Rolex.