by Tom Adelstein
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Would you expect a 1960 Hamilton, gold filled wristwatch in pretty good condition to sell for $2286 with 44 bids? It just happened on eBay a few days before I began this article during a slow buying period. That’s right, during that time of year when watch sales grind to a halt and warehouses fill very few orders.
Here’s a few other sales made in the last couple of weeks.
- 1969 Stainless Steel Hamilton Odyssee for $995
- A Viet Nam era British Pilot’s Wristwatch with ETA movement for $611
- A Gold Filled Linwood for $695
- 1983 Reissue Piping Rock with 17 Jewels Swiss Movement for $416
- Gold filled Ross for $395
- 1948 Boulton for $395.
24 months go, I bought a 1938 wristwatch for $135 plus shipping. That was considerably higher than the same model in the same condition would have sold for in an auction. I checked with Fast Fix Jewelry and they wanted $395 plus parts to clean, oil and adjust the watch. They also wanted four months to turn it around. Price disparity? I decided to have the dial restored, which cost $45 including shipping back and forth.
(One year later) I bought the same model for $45 and shipping was free. The watch was in mint condition. I felt befuddled.
If I didn’t know how to work on the movement myself, I would have to add $400 to the purchase price. If I also asked someone to buy, service and restore the dial, my cost of acquisition would have run approximately $585. That’s a decent estimate of the value for a working, restored 1938 Hamilton watch in 2010. Not today (2012).
Finally, the economics of supply and demand have reemerged. You will not find many vintage Hamilton watches today. The scarcity of the vintage watches has helped create rising prices, but that’s not enough to cause prices to rise as much as they have.
Two factors have contributed to the increased value of Hamilton watches. The first has to do with changes at eBay. Here’s a quote from an article in Huffington Post (Are eBay Auctions a Thing of the Past?) to give you an understanding:
Auction site eBay isn’t really much of an auction site anymore. This month, a study from the National Bureau of Economic Research reveals that less than 15 percent of all eBay listings are auction-only. Today, the majority of sales are made with eBay’s “Buy It Now” option — that is, buying it for a listed price like one does on Amazon or any other e-commerce site. This is down from nearly 100 percent 10 years ago.
Clearly, online shoppers have changed their habits and goals, and online auctions have fallen by the wayside. The four researchers from Stanford and eBay hypothesize that the time and effort it takes to win an auction encourages would-be buyers to directly buy goods instead. A decade ago, bidding on online auctions was a popular form of online entertainment. A lot has changed since 2003, and sites like Facebook and YouTube are taking up more of Internet users’ time. People are now looking for convenience when it comes to online shopping, not games.
I used to restore Hamilton vintage wristwatches and list them for a nominal starting price. Most of my buyers were retail jewelry stores. I was an eBay seller, but to people that paid about $125 for my watches and sold them for $450 to $1000 during Christmas.
Amazon changed the landscape for on-line retail. I saw a recent report on CNBC discussing how Amazon has taken business away from Walmart. The reporter said that Walmart sales were down 3% year to year and that 3% went to Amazon. Three percent may not seem like much, but in dollar terms it’s huge.
Huffington made another important observation when they wrote:
In February 2008, eBay changed its search ranking algorithm. Rather than putting the soonest-to-end listing at the top — a natural strategy for auctions with a fixed ending time, but less natural for posted price listings — it implemented a relevance ranking. Then in September 2008, eBay allowed 30 day posted price listings to be “rolled over” with automatic payment of the monthly listing fee.
Essentially, eBay converted their business so that low-price wholesalers became reasonably priced retailers.
How did that effect Hamilton prices? Watchmakers like me, couldn’t make even a small profit restoring old watches and putting them up for auction like we did from 2006 to 2009. We stopped buying broken watches and those old Hamilton watches went away to people who used them for parts.
A lack of watchmakers is other factor that has caused an increase in the price of Hamilton watches. People that could work on Hamilton watches and had parts in cabinets from bygone days have mostly died. The majority of watchmakers in the US for 40 years were World War II veterans, especially men confined to wheelchairs.
Around 1975, about 60,000 watchmakers worked in the industry. In 2010, that number has diminished to 2,500. The ten watch schools in the US graduate an average of 8 students per year and they don’t leave school ready to go to work.
People say the quartz revolution hurt the service industry. We didn’t need people to clean, oil and adjust Japanese watches. Watchmakers became battery changers, sold watchbands or replaced quartz movements.
That’s not true. Skilled watch repairers continue to have a place in the industry. Cheap quartz watches replaced cheap “pin pallet” mechanical movements. Yes but, the number of quality quartz movements with 6 to 25 jewels in expensive watches still need skilled repair men and women.
We have a shortage of watches, a shortage of parts, people able to work on old watches and a change in the pricing model at eBay – the main place people go to buy vintage watches.
What’s this tell you? You won’t find watches as good or better than most $5000 ones for less than $300 to $400 dollars as in years past. If you want a vintage Hamilton watch, better buy it now and look for someone who will work on older watches, because most contemporary watchmakers have stopped working on movements older than 10 years. And hobbyists typically ruin the watches on which they practice.
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