Why isn't it illegal to deny customers to buy spare parts?

[VWatchie]

5 hours ago, jdm said:

Yes, decade more, decade less

"Hand made", really says it all!

In another video with JL I saw him wear an Apple wrist wearable computer  Really disappointing. I won't be visiting that channel again 

[HectorLooi]

I have a quartz clock which I bought more than 40 years ago. It cost me more than a weeks pocket money in those days. It's still running. It's still accurate to maybe 30 seconds a month.

The newer clocks I have lasts about the life of 1 battery. And I just timed 1 yesterday. It was slow by 17 seconds per day. My 70 year old pendulum clock keeps better time than that.

Over our lifetime, things have changed from "Made to last" to "Not made to last" and now we are in the era of "Made not to last."

One of my friends who works for a mobile phone company said, "We are doing this for your own good. Or else we'll be surrounded with antiques. You wouldn't want to be using a Motorola brick would you?"

[david]

V Watchie

My dentist owns an expensive watch and needed to have it cleaned and oiled. The factory authorized service center told him the cost would be $1750.00 and  would take six months...It is obviously a racket and anybody thinking about purchasing one of these watches needs to carefully examine the consequences of getting ripped off.  The watch factories can get away with this scam by refusing to sell replacement parts.  

This does not mean that mechanical watches cannot be restored or repaired. With study,  practice and the proper equipment, watch parts can be made.  Clocks are repaired this way and if you watch the Steffen Pahlow videos on YouTube you can see that it is possible to do this with watches as well.  

This book, called the WISCONSIN SCHOOL OF WATCH REPAIR, was published at a time when watch parts could not be purchased and had to be made by the watchmaker.  It goes into great detail about making parts for watches.

david

Edited June 1, 2020 by david

[FLwatchguy73]

On 6/1/2020 at 12:59 AM, david said:

V Watchie

My dentist owns an expensive watch and needed to have it cleaned and oiled. The factory authorized service center told him the cost would be $1750.00 and  would take six months...It is obviously a racket and anybody thinking about purchasing one of these watches needs to carefully examine the consequences of getting ripped off.  The watch factories can get away with this scam by refusing to sell replacement parts.  

This does not mean that mechanical watches cannot be restored or repaired. With study,  practice and the proper equipment, watch parts can be made.  Clocks are repaired this way and if you watch the Steffen Pahlow videos on YouTube you can see that it is possible to do this with watches as well.  

This book, called the WISCONSIN SCHOOL OF WATCH REPAIR, was published at a time when watch parts could not be purchased and had to be made by the watchmaker.  It goes into great detail about making parts for watches.

david

Your dentist experienced something similar to the luxury item warranty scam! A luxury item has an obligatory service interval in order to maintain a warranty. If you do not follow it, your factory warranty is null and void. They do this with super cars like Ferrari, Lamborghini and the like. As an example, if you were to purchase a Bugatti Veyron ($2,000,000+) it has an annual warranty service cost of $20,000 and you are required to purchase new rims and tires every 2500 miles to the tune of $42,000 for the set. If you skip any scheduled service or you do not replace your tires at the specified interval, Bugatti will cancel your warranty and you are responsible for the full cost of any repairs. God help you if you get in an accident in one of these carbon fiber body super cars. I saw a Ferrari, La Ferrari that had a fist sized damage to a sill plate on the drivers side, ferrari flew in a specialist who repaired it to the tune of nearly $200,000!

[HectorLooi]

Your dentist should be quite used to that. Many of our premium dental equipment from a certain country in Europe that produces watches, have learnt to impose ridiculous conditions in their warranties. 

If you don't follow their maintenance protocol, if you use a competitor's product in their machine, they retain their rights to void their warranty. 

Now with the Covid-19 panic, many companies are putting out infection control equipment that have not been tested and proven effective. I just bought one such equipment due to industry and peer pressure. If you follow the company's maintenance protocol, the cost of the spare parts for just 1 year would come to the price of a new machine. 

Ridiculous! 

[david]

For some reason people have been brainwashed with the concept that if something is extremely expensive then it is a quality product. The fact that something expensive is a quality product may or may not be true. My background was manufacturing engineering and I have had a lifetime career looking at the way things are made.  Once I began to look at watches as a hobby and began examining them under a microscope I was able to see similarities in the way the internal parts were manufactured.  There are some watches produced in small quantities by cabinotiers like Philip De Fore, Roger Smith,  Vianney Halter, Roland Murphy and a few others  that are made in small batches that hob the gears and cut out most of the other parts in small batches.

There also large designer label watch factories that use high production stamping and machining equipment to turn out large quantities of watches. from 26,000 to 100,000 watches a year.  When you carefully examine the internal watch components  with a microscope you can see the tell tale marks on the side of  the parts  that show they came from either a stamping press or a wire EDM machine.  They are marketed as high end luxury items and imply that they are "hand made" by skilled watchmakers. In truth, they are mass produced watches, produced by production workers,  made the same way other mass produced watches are made.

There is a video made by  Patek  Philippe showing a guy making a pivot on a Jacot Lathe and pointing out that it takes him many hours to turn a pivot.  Do they seriously want you the believe that this guy is going to turn 40,000+ watch pivots a year. 

They and the other Swiss companies make a good watch but the gears are stamped the same way,  the watch faces are printed on pad presses the same way and the cylindrical parts are turned the same way on high production coil fed CNC lathes. 

In the end the customer is purchasing an expensive mass produced watch with a designer label name printed on the face. This does not mean that the customer is not getting a good watch.  It just means they are paying a lot of money for a mass produced product thinking that it isn't. 

david

Edited June 3, 2020 by david

[jdm]

2 hours ago, david said:

They are marketed as high end luxury items and imply that they are "hand made" by skilled watchmakers. In truth, they are mass produced watches, produced by production workers,  made the same way other mass produced watches are made.

There is a video made by  Patek  Philippe showing a guy making a pivot on a Jacot Lathe and pointing out that it takes him many hours to turn a pivot.  Do they seriously want you the believe that this guy is going to turn 40,000+ watch pivots a year. 

Correct. However not all the Swiss do marketing that way. Surely PP, AP, VC, and many others do, but Omega and Rolex do not. They all employ a large number of higly skilled workers, which is good. If you look the Breitiling video above at some point they show the room where the cases are cut, the hardening process, etc, teir product appeal is based more on the resound of precise machining than hand making. Then there are of course the few Masters really doing one piece at time with rose lathes and such, I was lucky to known one of them, Vincent Calabrese, a nice and humble person. And then tq are the ultra technologists, the like of Richard Mille, etc which nowaday make the most of Haute Horlogerie segment. It is a very diversified industry whith many connections to China where they produce a lot, but are still able to lable Swiss Made thanks to their laws. The only thing they all have in common is that they make unnecessary luxury items, pulling good profits (but not all) and are able to make buyers drool and repairers irate. Also we must remember that Switzerland makes all the tools to make watch and many precision devices. In the US, an accurate big industrial lathe is called Swiss turns. Whatever your opinion Switzerland deserves a lot of credit when it comes to the economy and other things too.

[nickelsilver]

Patek and AP (and others to different extents) have restoration departments where they do use old hand powered lathes and such to do the work. It's definitely not what they are using to produce new pieces.

 

As to the above reference about watchmakers making parts, there are some that do, and can make pretty much anything, but it always comes at a price. Something as common as a balance staff will almost certainly not be less than 250 for example, and the price goes up from there for more time consuming parts like pinions or wheels or escapement parts. This is simply because of the time involved, and doesn't count the years of experience and investment in specialized machines and tooling.

[VWatchie]

On 6/1/2020 at 6:59 AM, david said:

The factory authorized service center told him the cost would be $1750.00 and  would take six months...

 

On 6/1/2020 at 6:59 AM, david said:

The watch factories can get away with this scam by refusing to sell replacement parts.

That sums it up perfectly. The six month is equally upsetting as the price or perhaps even more upsetting. Six weeks would have been upsetting. Unfortunately, six month seems to become the standard even for standard watches such as SEIKO. How can people put up with it? No wonder more and more brands are moving towards in-house movements as there's serious money to be ripped off unsuspecting customers (read: victims). Even worse is that the manufacturers have made the average watch collector believe that in-house is always superior to ETA, SELLITA, MIYOTA, etc. when it is definitely not. As a watch collecting acquaintance of mine expressed it: "Why buy a Ferrari with a standard VW engine?", and that opinion, it seems, is on its way to become prevalent among unsuspecting collectors. Scary!

[VWatchie]

22 hours ago, FLwatchguy73 said:

Your dentist experienced something similar to the luxury item warranty scam!

For the rich money is never a problem so they simply don't care (that much).

[VWatchie]

9 hours ago, HectorLooi said:

If you follow the company's maintenance protocol, the cost of the spare parts for just 1 year would come to the price of a new machine. 

Should be made criminal. Sure, we can refuse to buy the product in the first place, but sometimes the consequences of such a decision could be detrimental. So, taking advantage of the consumer in such a situation is highly immoral and should imo be made criminal, unless the manufacturer can make a strong case for it.

[VWatchie]

5 hours ago, david said:

There is a video made by  Patek  Philippe showing a guy making a pivot on a Jacot Lathe and pointing out that it takes him many hours to turn a pivot.  Do they seriously want you the believe that this guy is going to turn 40,000+ watch pivots a year. 

Sure they are and the rich and famous enjoy being deceived.

[Colditz]

You are right VW. In most cases the rich care about the bling and how many diamonds and can everybody see what adorns the wrist.

For me a dress watch should be just that - Unassuming, functional and compliment the dress. I am not a fan of divers watches or any chronographs worn with an evening suit. Some like it, I guess it comes down to personal preference.

[FLwatchguy73]

1 hour ago, VWatchie said:

For the rich money is never a problem so they simply don't care (that much).

I'm not sure that always applies. I have encountered a dealership that has cars on consignment. They were bought then shortly after placed for sale. The dealership manager told me it was because of 2 reasons, warranty service was very expensive and nearly any other repair was 10's of thousands of dollars. This dealership was a Ferrari dealer and they had 3 LaFerrari's ($1.5 million each) on consignment because of this.

Edited June 3, 2020 by FLwatchguy73

[jdm]

1 hour ago, FLwatchguy73 said:

I have encountered a dealership that has cars on consignment. They were bought then shortly after placed for sale. The dealership manager told me it was because of 2 reasons, warranty service was very expensive and nearly any other repair was 10's of thousands of dollars. This dealership was a Ferrari dealer and they had 3 LaFerrari's ($1.5 million each) on consignment because of this.

I think that just tells that they weren't rich enough, and got quickly bored of the toy when the speed limit of 55 MPH, and is equally out of place at the racetrack. I had a friend that loved Ferrari, was wealthy but not rich, crashed his front engined thing at the track and got the monster bill. He then must have tought of saving on maintenance by opening his own Ferrari specialized shop, that was another mistake, the Italian mechanic he hired stuffed him somehow, before it was found that he was not legal to work in the US.

Rich is not one that owns a $15K watch or a 1.5 Mil car or house, is one that can lose it and can laugh that off becase it doesn't make a dent to his fortune.

Edited June 3, 2020 by jdm

[david]

So is a customer really paying for quality?   If you pay $100,000.00 for a watch or  2 1/2  million dollars for a car,   why should they need to be repaired?   Other than snob appeal,   what is a customer really paying for?  The watch I use is an $8.00 electronic watch I bought from WalMart about 10 years ago. All I had to do to it was change the battery every couple of years and it is accurate to within 5 seconds a month.  A certified Rolex chronometer is accurate to about 60 seconds a month and requires a lot more service costs over 10 years. 

We own 2 Toyota cars and a Toyota pick up truck. I have had the truck for more than 20 years, one of the sedans for 8 years and the other sedan for 13 years.  Outside of normal maintenance issues such as spark plugs, tires, hoses, belts, filters and batteries, all three vehicles have run perfectly.  One of my friends bought a new expensive  BMW and had to replace the engine before the car was 2 years old.  Which products are really quality products?   It isn't a coincidence that Toyota vehicles outlast other vehicles.  When other manufactures were switching to  timing belts and  installing plastic gears to cut costs, Toyota stayed with timing chains. In my view, Toyota is a quality product.

  I wrote a simple formula to determine quality.   Quality is inversely proportional to the cost required to keep something working over time (Q=T/$).  The other issues are marketing,  salesmanship and, of course, snob appeal.

david

[clockboy]

This has been an issue for number of years. In this months BHI mag it reports " Baselworld in Turmoil" with a sub heading " Demise of the Baselworld show as we know it": " Swiss Watch Industry in Turmoil" 

For this who don't know Baselworld is, was  Switzerlands oldest and largest watch fair and was the industry's 'go-to' fair for seven decades. The worlds watch makers including the leading brands would show off there latest products. But slowly but surely it has declined in 2018 the SWATCH GROUP departed, in 2019 Breitling, Seiko & Grand Seiko  departed, in 2020  Citizen, Bulove, Rolex,Tudor, Patek Philippe, Chopard & Chanel also have pulled out.

The reason for the collapse it appears is greed and monopoly conditions. Hotel prices increased during the fair week by 500% and visitors were forced to book for the entire week no matter how long their stay.  ALSO:

"Not helpful to the Swiss is their further gouging which pervades the repair/ service industry arising from restrictive spare parts policies the SWATCH GROUP and the brands. This is destroying the domain of the independent repairers around the world and opening for yet wider sorting of in-factory servicing and thus generating wider antipathy."

 

A really interesting article but I will be in trouble if I quote word for word from the BHI mag.

[jdm]

6 hours ago, clockboy said:

This has been an issue for number of years. In this months BHI mag it reports " Baselworld in Turmoil" with a sub heading " Demise of the Baselworld show as we know it": " Swiss Watch Industry in Turmoil" 

...

The reason for the collapse it appears is greed and monopoly conditions. :

I understand that the BHI folks must not have much sympathy for the Swiss watch industry, despite it being the main reason for the existence of watch repairers in the UK and the rest of the world since more than a century. But, that greed and monopoly are making it to enter turmoil or even decline is far from true. The Basel show is just that, a show, and won't tell us the actual numbers.

Last year the swiss recorded 21.7 Billion CHF worth of export, with an yearly increase of 2.4% .https://www.fhs.swiss/eng/2020_01_28_statistics.html

There have been worse and better years, but that was the tune during the past two decades as well https://www.statista.com/statistics/435009/revenue-of-the-swiss-watch-industry/

And for a general analysis of who gets the most of all that money https://watchesbysjx.com/2020/03/swiss-watch-industry-report-2020.html

We will have to see how they will do post-CV19, but my feeling is that luxury did and will keep selling big, like it or not.

 

Edited June 3, 2020 by jdm