Two taps on a phone return the time in any city on earth. By that logic, the wristwatch should have died as a category long ago. It did not. Does anyone truly need a watch? No. Yet watches still sell for twenty-five thousand dollars. In the same collection, a watch bought for five thousand decades ago now stands at twenty-five thousand; the alternative back then was a forty-dollar Swatch, still worth a few dozen dollars today. Both do the same job: showing the time. The function has been free for years, the business is still alive — where does the money come from?
The Most Accurate Timekeeping Never Sold a Watch
The question has to be asked from the other side: has any brand ever sold a watch on the claim of keeping the most accurate time? One company keeps its own advertising history unusually honest. The most accurate timekeeping — never mentioned. An invitation to buy — never made either. The entire film says one thing only: the watch will never truly be owned; its holder merely looks after it for the next generation. The company named the series: legacy. Telling time is free; legacy charges.
Eighty Dollars and Fifty Thousand, the Same Contents
A Swatch sells in Hong Kong for about eighty dollars. A Hermes Birkin sells for fifty thousand. What the Birkin holds is exactly what a cheap bag holds. A gap of several hundred times cannot be explained by function — not one cent of it. The basis of pricing moved long ago: no longer what the product does, but who the product lets a person become. This is value-based pricing — the value is not locked in the case, but in the wearer’s self-description. Function answers what the thing is; meaning answers who the person wearing it is. The premium lives in the second answer.
The Stupidity-Tax Charge Reads the Wrong Ledger
Some say that since eighty dollars and fifty thousand both tell the time, the expensive one is pure stupidity tax, and vanity pricing cannot last. That criticism rests on one premise: the product being sold is time-telling. The premise is gone. After all these years of free time-telling, the fifty-thousand-dollar bag still sells out — the money was never paid for the function in the first place. Whether it is a tax depends on which account it is booked to. Function is a purchase; so is meaning. Different accounts, different arithmetic for expensive and cheap. Audit a purchase of meaning with the ledger of function, and the verdict always reads stupidity tax.
A Slogan Fools Once; a Legacy Must Pay Out Every Generation
Others say the legacy advertising is just rhetoric — the watch is the same watch, and the premium is a marketing illusion. An illusion cannot carry decades. From the most accurate timekeeping to looking after the next generation, the brand moved the promise’s term from the product’s lifespan to beyond the buyer’s own — a day the buyer will never see, yet the promise must keep holding. A sentence nobody can verify became the most expensive part, precisely because it cannot be walked back. A slogan that deceives once is rhetoric; one that pays out generation after generation is an asset.
Appreciation Is the Effect, Not the Cause
Still others say a watch bought for a few thousand that rose to twenty-five thousand reflects investment skill, with nothing to do with psychological value. The order is reversed. Precisely because the narrative held — never truly owned, merely kept in trust — the resale market was willing to pay a premium for passing it to the next generation. Meaning comes first; the paper number is downstream. Count the gain and ignore the source, and cause and effect will never line up.
The person whose budget was forty dollars, who ended up paying a hundred times more and still felt ahead — what that person bought was indeed more than a watch.
Where the Function Is Still Scarce, Skip This
This logic has a premise: the function is already free. Where the function remains scarce — medicine, compute — the price still rests on the function, and meaning cannot carry it. Function gets people through the door; meaning gets people to pay. The day the function turns free, the price has nowhere to go but into meaning. Where it cannot move, the function has not turned free yet: the function itself is still collecting admission.
