TGIF: $10 Watch Lessons Learned

My most recent $10 Tuesday watch order was quite a disappointment. After several decent watches, the Alinker 36mm Square Dial watch was a very low quality and fragile timepiece. While I can be quite tolerant, the watch threw a spring bar from the clasp the very first time I tried to put it on. It'll be going back soon. It's not surprising to encounter some of the issues I posted about in the drawbacks of cheap watches. It might be more surprising that we encountered so few of the issues.

Alinker Square Dial Watch

This leaves me in a bit of a quandary.  I think we've exhausted the plausible $10 watch purchases on Amazon. It's time to move onto watches in the $20, $30, and dare I say $40 price ranges. The Ten Dollar Tuesday watch experiment hasn't been a total waste. Watches from Civo, Nibosi, Nuovo, EOJOMIN Gediyar, and Time100 all turned out to be pretty decent. One lesson that I've learned is that the quality of Chinese-brand watches is improving quickly. You can see most of the watches here on my Amazon affiliate store front.

Nibosi "Diamond" watch

Are there any good rules of thumb to follow when looking for a $10 watch? A Ten Dollar "on sale" watch from a company that usually sells $20 or $30 watches is a better bet than a watch that was always intended to be $10 or less. The Civo and Nibosi watches were the best of my purchases and both were originally intended to sell for $20 or $30.

You'll still see $10 watches on here from time to time, but I'm going to look for other low budget choices for watch enthusiasts.