SDC Weekly 34; Signalling value of watches; Supply & Demand with Moser, Roth et al.; Quartz crisis revisited
MoonSnoopy, Neuralink, Pokémon with guns, McLaren, Chrono Bleu, Train heists, How to spot a liar, IVF for Rhinos and more!
What could this quote possibly have to do with watches? Do you really know what the quartz crisis was actually about? Why is LVMH using a souscription model for their Daniel Roth reissues?
Hello 👋 and welcome back to the SDC Weekly. Today, you’ll find answers to the questions posed above, and you’ll find the older editions of SDC Weekly here.
Let’s dig in.
ScrewDownCrown is a reader-supported guide to the world of watch collecting, behavioural psychology, & other first world problems.
📶 Signalling value of watches
Fair warning: this is an unusual section… a walk down memory lane, and chock-full of opinions which you may disagree with. Oh, there’s also no real conclusion either.
This concept is something I have been acutely aware of since I was ten or eleven… but I was only able to make sense of it much later on, when I started buying relatively expensive watches. Let’s go back to the beginning…
When you’re a kid, material things are mostly meaningless unless you’re brought up in a materialistic environment which draws attention to objects with a high price tag or from a highly recognisable brand. I remember, as a child living in Zambia, we would go to Woolworths1 in South Africa once a year during the holidays to buy clothing for the next entire year. This was objectively ‘cheap’ clothing but I loved and wore the sh*t out of all of it. Although I attended what most would consider ‘an expensive school’ this was the only ‘major expense’ in our household. Nobody ever cared about the clothes I wore or the labels on these clothes. It was all non-descript stuff, and while there was nothing ‘bad’ about any of it, there was nothing that stood out either.
That is, except, for one specific incident which sticks with me to this day. Our family went on holiday to the US, and I was hell bent on buying a pair of black sneakers for some reason. I was not brand conscious, nor did I have anything particular in mind - just needed them to be black. My brothers and I had been given a budget of $100 each, and I ended up buying a pair of Air Max Nike for one reason only: they were the only black sneakers I liked in the store. For context, this was an ‘International School’ - the type with expat teachers and lots of students whose parents were expats… many of the kids’ parents were Ambassadors from different countries around the world, or corporate executives who worked for large western companies but were placed in Zambia to head up growth in the region. So these kids, on average, had a lot more ‘world exposure’ than just any student from a regular school.
Anyway, I got back to school after the holidays and of course, was wearing my new sneakers2 in the hallway. Initially one of the senior students, who I recognised from being on the basketball team, noticed the sneakers and walked up to me to ask where I had got them. By the way… this is the equivalent of a ‘star quarterback’ in a US ‘football’ game talking to his biggest 10-year-old fan. Anyway, this had a bit of a snowball effect… remember, we’re in a school hallway, so lots of kids are roaming around, and are watching this unfold.
Eventually, there was a circle of people gathered round, asking me to lift the shoes up, to see the bottom, and get a better look at the various air bubbles and textures… honestly, this whole scene is burned into my memory, and all I can say is it must be the closest I have come to feeling what its like to be a ‘celebrity’. Talk about peaking early!
From then on, the bloke from the basketball team would say hello to me whenever he saw me, and I think that single ‘incident’ ended up raising my ‘cool status’ permanently in that school for the duration of my stay. I still wore and enjoyed the shoes, and I even remember the moment when I ruined them permanently by stepping on a massive thorn at a safari lodge. I remember the man who helped me remove it… I remember how the air bubble was no longer firm… I remember it all. I loved those shoes, and the lessons it taught me only became clear to me many years later.
Much later, when we relocated to South Africa, I made friends with a guy who was the younger brother of my father’s business partner. This guy’s family was actually the wealthiest family in the whole town. I think I must have been twelve at the time, but the concepts of ‘expensive cars’ or '‘designer brands’ were completely foreign to me. This guy was maybe 17, but by virtue of being at his house all the time while my dad was visiting his business partner, we started hanging out. He took me under his wing like a little brother; we would go out on his jet skis often, attend concerts, and drive around in his sports cars. He was most famous for having an insane sound system in his favourite car, which would win awards in car magazines - the relevance of all of this was lost on me, as I was a random kid from Zambia who cared for nothing other than having fun.
What became obvious to me (much later) was how much he appreciated my disregard for material value. I wasn’t hanging out with him to use his stuff, or to enjoy his cars or to brag to my other friends about having done any of this stuff. I was simply hanging out, and we were enjoying time spent together. I recall being in school, and other kids coming up to me saying “I saw you driving around with that bloke… that car is so cool… what’s it like…” - and I never understood the underlying psychology at the time.
That young me, the naïve me, was learning about a concept which all wealthy people suffer from: the impossible task of deciphering other people’s intentions when they interact with you. Ask any billionaire, and they will tell you they are usually good friends only with people who knew them before they became super rich - and if they grew up rich, they either have no real close friends, or their closest friends tend to be people they connected with in their childhood, people of equal means who have no reason to ‘use’ them, and perhaps people who they have been getting along with from a time before they understood wealth at all.
Ok cool… now fast forward to the present, and you’re probably wondering what this has to do with watches. Please allow me one final tangent. You have probably experienced a situation when you’re at some event or location, potentially even meeting people you already know… but then someone arrives in an ultra expensive or exclusive car. This has an impact on the people who observe their arrival, because humans love to categorise people in some sort of mental hierarchy. Many may never speak of this out loud, but psychologically it is impossible not to do this - even if you never act upon the information.