There is a global shortage of Rolex watches
It would seem absurd, considering that the company produces about a million products a year. Try buying, for example, a Rolex Oyster Perpetual or Submariner from an official dealer at the price set by the brand at almost 6 thousand dollars. And you can't. They are simply not available. Rolex is being held hostage by the gray market and cunning sellers. The company itself is in denial about what is happening and contentedly pockets its $8,6 billion in revenue every year: “We cannot meet demand and produce more watches. This will affect the quality. We ship our products to authorized retailers and they manage their distribution themselves.”
Where does the million watches produced go? Of course, one can assume that the dictatorial trend has affected fashion and now everyone wants to wear two pairs of watches on one hand like Fidel Castro. But everything is much more prosaic. Dealers use the good old Hermes store technique - they openly ask buyers interested in watches to first spend a tenner on something else before they come out with a green Rolex box. But most are sold to “their” clients, who resell the production on the gray market and share the interest. And not small ones, since the cost of the watch triples as soon as you take it out of the store of an authorized dealer. There have been several lawsuits in the US where sellers sold hundreds of thousands of dollars worth of watches to themselves and then traded them through Facebook, Instagram and WeChat to the Asian market.
An uncontrolled gray market will sooner or later deal a blow to the Rolex brand, so marketers believe - people will buy fakes both accidentally and on purpose. There is already a similar precedent with Birkin bags. I don't share the fever around Rolex watches. Once I found a Submariner watch from my lover and went for a walk in Beverly Hills: people attacked me with a desire to take it off me right now for twenty thousand dollars (their official price is 10 thousand). I was lucky because someone was recently shown wearing one of these Rolexes on Rodeo Drive in broad daylight.
In general, why do you need all these watches and bags? The best things, love and sex, are free in this life. All people are rich.
Author: Yunia Pugacheva
