Swiss Army Wristwatch Marketing Strategy?

I'm not into fancy wristwatches.  Nor into the ultra-cheap digital-display kind either.  Moreover, I'm not a mechanical movement snob: battery-powered does the job without the need for expensive periodic cleanings and maintenance.

Eons ago, I bought an Omega Seamaster at a PX in Korea and wore it for 20 years or longer.  But it didn't keep time well, and the maintenance costs drove me to cheapo digitals and Swatches.

In the late 1990s I finally settled on a nice line of watches from Victorinox, the Swiss Army knife company.  Black case and matching rubbery band: nice looking and less than $100 back then.  Over the years I bought two more similar watches.  Then that line disappeared.

In 2013 my wife bought me a different style Victorinox in Cologne (Köln) Germany -- a nice-looking gray item with a matching cloth band.  But this cost close to $300.  For the last few years the Victorinox watches I've seen in their London store have prices starting on the order of $400, a figure I just confirmed by checking their Web page.  That's more than I care to spend on a timepiece.

The only option was to shop other brands.  I did buy a nice Skagen watch at the fancy mall at Shepherd's Bush in London a few months ago, and use it on dressier occasions.  And a few weeks ago I bought a sporty Wenger watch while on a cruise ship.  The former sold for about $200, the latter for around $150.

Now it seems that Wenger was a maker of Swiss Army watches that was bought by Victorinox in 2005.  Wenger's knives have been phased out, and the brand is now used for travel items and watches.

My take is that by bringing in lower-priced Wenger watches, this allowed Victorinox watches to be moved upscale from where they were when I first started buying them.  The result is that, now that I know what happened, I can still but moderately-priced Swiss Army type wrist watches, but not the Victorinox branded ones.

The Joys of a Broken Rib

Since my wife died, I've been doing a lot of travel.  Most recently was a western Mediterranean cruise that included some places new to me.

On a showery day in Palma de Mallorca I slipped on a broad, slick crosswalk stripe, instantly fell on my back and broke a rib on a large, rounded paving stone.

This is about my adventures getting home from Barcelona, where the cruise ended.

My return flight booking was on an Air France subsidiary called Joon -- pronounced and intended as a cute version of jeune (young).  That would get me to Paris where I'd catch a regular Air France to Seattle.

Alas!  I learned at the airport that the Joon fight had been canceled.  Fortunately, they were able to book me on British Airways to London and then Seattle, arriving not long after I otherwise would have.  That worked out well.

When I entered my apartment house the elevator had a sign saying that it was broken.  My man-cave is on the 4th floor.  So here I was, 22 hours after I had woken up, with a broken rib and a suitcase weighing close to 40 pounds.  The stairway is a zig-zag affair, doing one floor in two segments with a flat turnaround between each zig and zag -- six sets of stairs in all to the 4th floor.   The step rise is a little less than the standard 8 inches, which was helpful.   Pulling the suitcase after me was out of the question because that would have meant twisting my body under the strain of its weight: very painful.  So using a knee, I'd heft/kick it to the 3rd step, then heft 2 steps at a time to get to the next flat spot.  A slow process: tiring and with some pain.

Once I got to my apartment I had to decide where I would sleep.   The first two nights following my fall I slept in the ship cabin bed.  But getting out of bed was extremely painful because I had to twist my body.  On a scale of 0-10 where 10 is unbearable, I was at about level 8 or a touch higher, involuntarily crying out with each movement.  The final cruise night I slept in a chair, where rising didn't involve twisting.

I continue to sleep either sitting up or reclining. The first couple nights here I used the couch, but now I use a chair that reclines, allowing me to be more horizontal. Whether the rib is starting to heal or through better use of pain killers, I'm doing better on that front. I alternate Ibuprofen and Tylenol every three hours (based on the doc's hint) and that keeps a fairly steady stream of pain relief in me. The rib area is not pain-free, but the sensations are manageable.

Now I need to lose some of the weight I gained while on the cruise.

Self-Driving Cars: Future or Fad

I'm old enough to have lived through a number of fads that had promised to be waves of the future, an inevitable future where the fad-subject would be in total domination.

Of course, sometimes this proves to be the case.  More often, the item does continue into the future but in modified and not dominant form.

So it might well be regarding the current flurry for self-driving cars.

My bias is that I would almost never want to own one.  Further, I find it hard to believe that any kind of sensor-based systems can substitute for human perception coupled with experience.  Possibly in a hundred years, if "artificial intelligence" proves to be as good as its proponents claim.  But that too is an intellectual fad, though a long lasting one that might come to pass.

In, say, ten years the government (alias Big Brother) mandates that all new cars be self-driving, I hope the lawmakers and regulators are wise enough to allow the self-driving mode to be switched on or off at the driver's discretion.  Self-driving on sensor-rich highways and arterials and human-driving on country roads or off-road trails.

Bright Car Colors

Back in the early 1970s the fashion for automobile paint schemes was for really bright, bold colors.

For example, here is my 1971 Porsche 914:

It was a pretty small car -- a lot smaller than current Porsches, for instance.  But the bright colors worked just about as well as more conservative hues.  Moreover, this was true of most smaller cars: the smaller the car, the easier it was to wear bright colors.  On the other hand, most large cars seemed odd if they were painted that way.

In my opinion, the only large cars that could handle bright colors were convertibles such as this 1950 Cadillac, one of the largest automobiles of its day.  Perhaps the lack of a metal top that would add even more sheet metal requiring paint made the difference.  Or maybe it simply had to do with convertibles being sporty cars where bright colors were a factor in that sportiness.  Either way, perception psychology seems to matter.

And so it follows that large, formal cars seem to look better painted in dark hues such as on this 1953 Cadillac 60 Special.

Pre-1946 Military History is Best

I confess to being a military history buff.  Have been reading it almost since I became aware that there was such things as history books.  Well, perhaps a bit later than that, but certainly by the time I was in junior high school.

I also kept up with developments in military equipment, aircraft in particular.

The problem was, much about recent (at the time) military history as well as the current equipment was classified.  What information that was available -- especially for things such as capabilities of currently active aircraft -- could sometimes border on Public Relations press releases.  (My Army job happened to be Public Relations, by the way.)

After a period of time, information became declassified.  Probably the most famous case was Ultra, the British decoding of coded and enciphered German radio messages.  Histories of World War 2 written before 1974 did not include this important information: we had to wait nearly 30 years after the war ended to learn of it.

So now I tend to ignore accounts of military events that occurred, say, less than 70 years ago.  As for aircraft, information about types currently in service might not be entirely trustworthy, especially regarding any defects or limitations.

Recently I've been reading a lot about naval vessels from World War 2 and earlier, and figure I'm gettin a fairly truthful picture.

Father Nosser

I don't know what the U.S. Army does these days, but when I was attached to Fort Meade, Maryland's post headquarters we had to take maybe one morning a month for Training.  Part of that was something called "character guidance" which meant that a chaplain would speak to us.

The one chaplain I still remember was Father Nosser, a Catholic.  Being an army captain and unmarried he could afford a sporty Oldsmobile -- none of that vow of poverty for chaplains, though I suppose he did turn over part of his income to the Church.

When he gave us character guidance he first lit up a cigarette.  Then he would casually lean on the podium and say a bunch of casual things with a message buried someplace.  When his cigarette burned down to a nub, he'd snuff it and end his talk -- the cigarette being his timer.

I always enjoyed Father Nosser because he was brief and fun to hear.

Overpriced Goods

I have no problem with the existence of luxury goods such as Bentley automobiles and what can be found in Hermès stores.  After all, their creation involves the employment of lots of people, and that's good.  And if a buyer has plenty of money to spend on such items and does so, that too is fine because it helps keep the economy chugging along.

A few of us have to keep an eye on our spending.  I don't know about you, but I seem to maintain a mental sense as to whether a product is overpriced.

That sense is clearly subjective.  In almost all cases I have no knowledge of the cost of materials and labor that go into something.  I do know what inexpensive products of the same kind can cost in an approximate sense.  I seldom comparison shop, but that option would yield better information and would be easy to do, especially using the Internet.

Take the case of womens' purses.  My late wife for several years was enamored of a particular Chanel design.  Year after year we would walk past the Chanel store in the Wynn casino in Los Vegas, and each time the price would be several hundred dollars higher than the last time on the item that we first saw priced at around $3,500.  She could afford it, but couldn't quite justify buying it, tempting though it was.

I just checked the Web and saw a Guess purse priced nicely under $100.  Functionally, it is essentially the same as the Chanel item.  Now, the Chanel purse surely was made of better materials -- but the difference couldn't have cost the maker more than several hundred dollars more.  And the Guess purse was probably made in a low-wage country whereas, for all I know, the Chanel might have been made in high-wage France.  Again, the difference was probably a matter of hundreds of dollars and not thousands.  I do not know how much it actually cost Chanel or its supplier to make that by-now $4,000+ purse, but surely it was far less than the asking price.  Even allowing for distribution, marketing, and retailing expenses, that purse could be considered overpriced.

Nevertheless, those purses do sell because of intangible factors related to the various motivation buyers bring to Chanel stores.  If it's fine by them, it's fine by me.

I admit to liking certain brands such as Filson, Barbour, Belstaff and Paul & Shark.  Filson and Barbour jackets are priced at the upper edge of my comfort zone.  Paul & Shark sweaters usually cost more than I'm willing to pay, so I usually buy mine when they are on sale.  The same is true for Belstaff jackets.  However, I did see a particularly enticing Belstaff in their Munich store in May and bought it even though it cost about 50% more than I would have preferred to pay.

Another case is Burberry.  Over the years I've purchased two of their trench coats and a sweater or two.  Nowadays what they offer strikes me as being about double what I think is their worth.  Even items in their outlet stores strike me as being too expensive.

You might wonder why I don't simply consider less expensive brands.  It's because I'm probably of the same mindset as those who shop at Chanel and Hermès, but at a different zone of the price/prestige scale.