Finding a Watch

Posted by Lorren on September 5, 2008

With this day and age of internet shopping and having almost everything at your fingertips with the touch of a button… I’m shocked at how difficult it is to find a good watch.

I want a nice digital watch. Give me a couple of alarms, timer, chronograph, and make it waterproof. I don’t want an analog readout, and I’d like to be able to press a button and read what time it is if I wake up in the middle of the night.

So what is so hard about that? There are lots of watches like that. The problem is, most of these watches aren’t nice. They put all of these great features on a throwaway watchband that’s going to break on you after a year.

I’ve probably been on a quest for a really nice watch for the past 5 years or so. I bought a couple of Timex watches with the plastic watchbands… the kind you can find at Wal-Mart or any other store that sells popular watches. I had two watchbands in a row break on me. The plastic wore out. So I decided to try to find a watch that did not have a plastic watchband.

That’s a task that’s easier said than done. I searched through several stores, and all the watches that had metal or leather watchbands were all analog or men’s watches.

So I did what every thinking person does when they can’t find what they want in the local stores… search the internet. Even that was not as easy as it sounded. Most watch web sites don’t have a search feature where you can search by watch band material. Some don’t even list what it is made out of. After visiting a few sites, I discovered that Amazon.com has a watch search feature. You can search for women’s watches, or men’s watches. They have watches for kids, but I don’t know if they have a search feature for that.

It still took me a while to find the watch I wanted on Amazon.com, but I finally came up with this watch:

I had never worn a velcro watch before, but I figured that at least the plastic band wouldn’t break on me.

It has been a good watch… probably better than any plastic-banded watch, but after a little over a year, the velcro decided that it didn’t want to stick any more. So I replaced the velcro. That got me about 9 more months of use out of it. I’m still wearing it, but the stitching in my velcro replacement project is going out, and now the plastic bezel has come off the watch. So I purchased a replacement last night, and I’m just waiting for it to arrive.

Again, searching for a watch was a pain. So many plastic-banded watches, so few cloth, metal, or leather banded digital, waterproof, ladies’ watches. I spent a couple hours searching last night, for hopefully what will be a watch that will last a while. I ended up finding this watch:

It has a cloth band, so it won’t break on me, it has a buckle for a clasp rather than velcro, and it has all the digital features that I’d like. Let’s hope that this watch is nice and lasts a while.