Scott Meyer

How to See Things for What They Really Are

Added 2025-05-12 07:00:01 +0000 UTC

No, I do not own a Rolex. I can’t imagine buying a Rolex, and if I were given one as a gift, it would probably be used to keep track of time inside the safety deposit box I would have to rent just to store the Rolex.

That said, it is fascinating to me how products that are valued for their dependability and quality become wealth signifiers. Louis Vuitton was a guy who made durable luggage; now look at the company he started.

Here’s an interesting factoid I learned while researching this: any Louis Vuitton bag you see that has the LV logo all over it in a repeating pattern is not leather. Even the genuine ones bought directly from the company; if it has the repeating logo, the leather is fake. The leather trim might be real. The huge price tag is definitely real.

Back to Rolex. You hear stories about guys who were soldiers in Vietnam, and bought their Rolex at the PX, and decades later the watch is worth a small fortune.

My father was a truck driver when I was a child. He needed to be on schedule. The first watch I remember seeing was his. It was a simple-looking stainless-steel number with a weird name on the dial: “Longines.” It wasn’t a fancy model or anything, but it was a good-quality automatic mechanical watch. It wasn’t cheap at the time, but a guy in Outlook, Washington who drove a cement truck could afford it. Now it would be valuable to a collector, and might give my father a nice little pile of cash, if it hadn’t been stolen years ago.

Like I said, if I had a Rolex, I’d feel like I’d need a safety deposit box for it.