Whimsical Friday: Death of the Wristwatch

[Whimsical Friday is a light-hearted note on any technology that impacts our lives in some form or fashion.]

While out and about Saturday afternoon I asked my teenage son to tell me what time it was because I had forgotten to put on my watch. Instead of him looking at a wristwatch he pulled out his phone to give me the time. Just like my daughter, 7 years his elder, who told me 6 years ago she didn't need a wristwatch because she could always get the time from her phone and/or iPod, one of which will be in her possession at all times. For the next few days when I dropped off my son at school, I noticed there were only a few students actually wearing watches. Heck, on some days I would see no students with a wristwatch on. Do you think Timex, Swatch, and Rolex know that Generation Z aren’t wearing watches? When did this happen?

It’s easy to understand cell phones replacing pagers, two-way communication devices, and land line phones; and iPods replacing portable cassette and CD players, and even CD’s for that matter, but wristwatches? I should have realized this sooner when I was in NYC about 7 years ago, I remember making the observation that there were more street vendors selling DVD’s versus watches. However, I didn’t make the correlation that the wristwatch was actually being replaced by an emerging technology. I thought the street vendors had a higher profit margin in hawking bootleg DVD’s versus bootleg wristwatches, hence the change in products.

In any case, the wristwatch has been terminated seemingly from an unlikely technology, cell phones and portable music players, and the street vendors of NYC were the first to realize it.