Is The Rolex Submariner King of all Watches?

Swiss Fake Watch Industry

Not long ago a subject came up in the comments which, well, comes up rather frequently in the comments: The continuing and apparently (I use the word advisedly) incurable shortage of certain stainless steel sports watches. The problem is not confined to Rolex nor to Audemars Piguet, although those two brands both have watches which have become poster children for a short or non-existent supply of watches available at retail (I say retail specifically because, as with anything else, you can have whatever you want as long as you are willing to pay for it).

Rolex, though not the only company tough to buy at retail, makes an interesting case study insofar as Rolex, when it comes to shortages, is the watch industry writ large. The fact that Rolex watches are difficult (not impossible, but difficult) to find at retail from an authorized dealer is well known and there have been endless discussions about the degree to which this may or may not be due to various factors. These include a deliberate holding-back by Rolex of watches from retailers (various hypotheses exist as to why the company might be doing that); deliberate hoarding of stock by retailers in order to increase street price; shortages in production due to pandemic-related factory closures; and so on. Rolex has said, officially, that the shortage is purely due to unprecedented demand. When the subject does come up in the comments readers sometimes express what I think is a natural skepticism over the idea that it is simply a matter of demand outstripping supply by a considerable margin – are there really that many more people who want a Rolex now than in, say, 2015, when I started at

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In April, I decided to buy my wife a Rolex. Her 33rd birthday was approaching, and I needed a gift befitting a woman who in the past two years had not only changed career, but given birth in a pandemic-ravaged hospital and raised a child during violent protests near our home in Los Angeles. For months, it felt like the Rolex Oyster Perpetual had been following us. Its handsome blue face stared out from our favourite glossy magazines. Television commercials for the same model interrupted the Australian Open. And on Instagram, #perpetual was unavoidable. On the day we left the city for a new life in the suburbs, the Oyster Perpetual, a stainless steel miracle of horology, watched us drive past from a freeway billboard. It seemed like Rolex had spent millions marketing this $5,800 watch directly to us. So I popped down to my nearest authorised dealer to pick one up. At Ben Bridge Jeweler in a mall in Thousand Oaks, California, I found only empty cabinets and an apologetic salesperson. They didn’t have any Oyster Perpetuals, he said with a shrug. They didn’t have any Rolex watches at all. The store looked like a gang of ram raiders had just left and, when I found the same thing at other boutiques, something didn’t feel right. I scrolled through Rolex’s Instagram account and found the comments section festering in conspiracy. “Rolex produces a million watches a year,” wrote one follower. “Then grey market dealers buy them all up and sell them at a premium.” What was this grey market, I wondered. And could I buy my wife a watch there before her birthday in May? The inner workings of the Rolex company are cloaked in mystery, much like the complicated movements of its watches, which are invisible to the wearer. Rolex timepieces generate more than $8.6bn in sales annually, but the brand belongs to the Wilsdorf Foundation, which funnels its profits to worthy causes and the arts. The foundation is named after Hans Wilsdorf, an orphan who founded Rolex in 1905 and established the foundation 40 years later. For decades the Rolex watch has remained the ultimate status symbol — one in plentiful supply. In the 1960s Fidel Castro wore two at once. Those days are over.