Francesco:

You suggest a lot of different factors that could cause a watch like this to be offered for sale by a dealer like this: laziness (versus rigor in verification of watches) / ignorance (versus intentional misrepresentation) / greed (versus fairness).

Perhaps others have views as to why this happens.

Jeff

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Jeff:

I will try to put together a more articulated answer later. As of now, please allow me to present a perspective to this issue that comes down to a dirty money-talk associated with real-estate.

Aaron Faber is on West 53rd, opposite side of the block from MOMA, right off the Fifth Avenue corner. It is in one in the most expensive retail areas of NYC, where rents can be as high as $3,000/SF (surprisingly the opposite sunnier side of Fifth is even more expensive!). For a limited 1,000sf size, it comes down to something in the area of a 1/4 million dollar rent per month.

Yes, $250,000 every 30 days!!!(I will leave to our European friends the fun of converting square footage and $). With these astronomical figures, who takes the sweet time to determine if that Siffert is actually an MKII, an MK2.5 or an MKIII and a quarter...???? or spending months on OTD to figure out all the possible variations?

Considering also that, as you know well, on the other side of W53rd by Avenue of the Americas there are the headquarters of all the major world financial institutions and the inevitable traffic of powerful money-people, well...that might also offer an explanation of the high-end prices often seen at Aaron Faber.....

Apologies for the 4pm rant and for the hard-hearted tone, but temperatures in NYC are descending toward single digits and I need some warming up excuses....:-)

Best,

Francesco