About a year ago the producer of one of the other Reality TV Pawn shows (not Pawn Stars) emailed me about procuring a particular American railroad pocket watch, an example of which he had seen on my website. The watch was a 16 size, 60 hour Bunn Special made by the Illinois Watch Company. His email contained his cell number so I called him up. He told me that they were going to be filming an episode in Chicago and one of the segments was based on a true story of buying one of these Bunn Specials. I asked him a bunch of questions and the gist of what was going on was that his show was a re-enactment of true stories from a real pawn shop. The seller/pawner in this case would be an actor and the watch would be a prop. BTW, I did not end up letting him use one of my watches but referred him to a good friend who actually lives in Chicago who lent the show one of his.

I make no claim to know how Pawn Stars works. My bet is that the actual buys you see are re-enacted to some extent, but perhaps not to the extent of the show which contacted me.

The reason I say this is that it has to seem weird to all of us Heuer people that Rick would know the value of a scarce Heuer version like this seemingly right off the top of his head. I live in old jewelry stores and pawnshops all over the country. I know pawnshop owners from the big shops and the small shops and the multi-generation old shops to the new shops. I don't think I know any of them who would know about a watch like this Siffert except perhaps peripherally. I can tell you with very little doubt that none of the owners I know would have offered close to 8 grand for this watch as it came in over their counter. Even if they might have looked on eBay and observed actual Siffert sales they would never have offered more than half. They just don't operate like Rick does. There is too much risk and not enough reward in offering that much for a watch you don't know everything about. I think we can probably safely assume that there was a certain amount of "Setup" involved in this segment. It is TV. It has to work. Reality does not usually work exactly as encountered. Pawn Stars just isn't how the real world works.

Just sayin'

JohnCote
Professional Cynic