"You can start getting very good automatics for $3k or so."
For 3k you are either looking for something extremely fancy or you are already paying for 2k for the brand. Below a few brands, some very old, all of them use swiss made mechanical automatic movement. I don't remember having been in an airport and not having seen Rolex advertisement. But someone is paying for this advertisement. And again, if you buy from a dealer he may have something like a 100% mark up.
Here is an estimate of Rolex cost vs price and it is close what I suspected. " by gathering publicly available prices for similar products, we can estimate that the production cost of an average stainless steel Rolex watch retailing at USD 5,000 is less than USD 1,000. Maybe even less than USD 750."
I don't say don't buy one. But understand that you pay 80% of the cost for the brand. If you need the brand, buy it. If you just like the mechanics you can get a very good watch for a tiny fraction of the price.
For 3k you are either looking for something extremely fancy or you are already paying for 2k for the brand. Below a few brands, some very old, all of them use swiss made mechanical automatic movement. I don't remember having been in an airport and not having seen Rolex advertisement. But someone is paying for this advertisement. And again, if you buy from a dealer he may have something like a 100% mark up.
http://www.archimede-uhren.de/
https://shop.laco.de/
http://www.ebay.de/usr/erkahund
https://www.steinhartwatches.de
http://www.stowa.de
Here is an estimate of Rolex cost vs price and it is close what I suspected. " by gathering publicly available prices for similar products, we can estimate that the production cost of an average stainless steel Rolex watch retailing at USD 5,000 is less than USD 1,000. Maybe even less than USD 750."
https://www.quora.com/How-much-does-it-actually-cost-Rolex-t...
I don't say don't buy one. But understand that you pay 80% of the cost for the brand. If you need the brand, buy it. If you just like the mechanics you can get a very good watch for a tiny fraction of the price.