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The Enabler: How To Justify Buying Another Watch. (#5: “The Cost Per Wear Argument”) The Enabler: How To Justify Buying Another Watch. (#5: “The Cost Per Wear Argument”)

The Enabler: How To Justify Buying Another Watch. (#5: “The Cost Per Wear Argument”)

Luke Benedictus

NOTE: We understand that you’ve found a new watch to add to your collection (congratulations!). But rationalising this fact – coupled with the fact that it’ll cost a bucket-load of cash – may not always sit well with the less horologically minded. That’s where we come in … Use The Enabler’s advanced levels of sophistry to validate your latest acquisition.

There are times in life when you don’t want to come across as some hairy-arsed chancer. You need to bestow yourself with the veneer of credibility and moral judgement. In short, you have to present yourself as halfway convincing.

How to pull off this daunting charade? Obviously, it’s a tricky business and a firm handshake won’t seal the deal alone. Citing a statistic to back your argument can help you to sound a little more plausible. A confident stat — not entirely fictitious if possible — adds critical heft and rigour to your delivery. It makes you sound far more knowledgeable and assured.

Yet to take things up a notch and really baffle someone into compliance, then you need to harness the power of maths.

Remember your trigonometry lessons at school? Me neither. And that’s precisely my point. No one really understands maths. So if you wheel it out in an argument, people tend to go along with it unblinkingly rather than betray their ignorance.

The Cost Per Wear Argument

This is why the “cost per wear” argument can prove so devastating in justifying your next watch purchase. Cost per wear is the watch buyer’s validation mechanism par excellence. The equation breaks down like this:

CPW = Total cost of the watch + Maintenance / Number of days you’ll wear it.

The beauty of this is that it can build on “The Heirloom Defence” that argues that a watch’s shelf-life is multi-generational. But even if you want to deal with more tangible numbers, it’s still a formidable argument.

Better still, it genuinely adds up. Let’s say you manage to leap-frog the waiting list to buy the new Rolex GMT-Master II. At $12,250, it’s a considerable sum of money. Nevertheless, you conservatively estimate that you’ll get 40 solid years of wear out of this watch. You also plan to get it serviced every five years at a cost of, say, $500 a go.

If you allow me to crunch the numbers, the daily cost per wear of your Rolex breaks down over 40 years to $1.13 per day. That’s a lot cheaper than a cup of coffee. In fact, perhaps you should buy two?