What luxury watch to buy?

Buying a nice wristwatch can be a frustrating experience for both the novice and expert watch collector. The following guide is intended to help buyers navigate more effectively with retailers when it comes to buying a new timepiece. It is beyond the scope of this guide to explain what particular watch you should get or what brands are the best. This is for people who want to enter a watch store and have a useful discussion with anyone who is trying to sell them something.

Watches themselves are complex items that require a lot of knowledge when it comes to choosing the right piece, understanding a timepiece’s features, and being able to appreciate alternative purchase options. High-end watches are sold via third-party jewelry stores or larger department stores, as well as at brand boutiques. Many high-end watches are also sold online. In any event, at some point you’ll probably find yourself communicating with a salesperson.

Wristwatch salespeople have a spotty record – at least here in the United States. Like all sales positions, watch salespeople are highly performance oriented (meaning they get paid partially or fully on commission when they make sales), and they are often subject to high churn (employees come and go regularly due to the nature of the job). People who sell watches often arrive from other sales jobs, perhaps in fashion, jewelry, or otherwise. Many of them are entry level, and are there to help customers as best they can without being too highly skilled on the subject matter. So why is it that watch salespeople in the US don’t have the best reputation? It is because many of them are said to be inappropriately snobby and too frequently ignorant about the watches they are trying to sell.

The companies that make watches do extend considerable effort in trying to educate watch retailers properly, though they can’t control everything, nor can most people be properly educated about fine watches unless they have had years of experience. Today, most watch salespeople are best when it comes to taking your money and performing sales transactions. This is because so many customers these days are going into watch stores already knowing what they want, and more about the product than the salespeople. We can thank the internet and sites like aBlogtoWatch for that.