Grumped: Cartier watches

A few years ago when I was employed by someone else to run their agency (rather than run my own) and I was earning too much money (ergo: I don’t earn loads now!!!), I made a very frivolous purchase.

That purchase was a Cartier watch - it cost several thousand pounds. The thrill of buying it was amazing and it came in the BIGGEST box that you have ever seen (about 30 cm by 30 cm by 20 cm) to house a watch. But the box did come with two straps (a metal one and a leather one) plus an all important lifetime guarantee – which I was told by the jewellers to keep safe and they did all the necessary stamping to it to prove purchase etc.

I have to say that I really loved that watch and wore it every day for more than five years. Now a while back it started to lose time and making a weird clucking noise. So I hocked out the lifetime guarantee from the aforementioned box and took it back to the jewellers. They filled out all the paperwork, keeping the lifetime guarantee documentation and I paid the £20 charge to get the watch sent off to Cartier. I got a call from the jewellers about two weeks later telling me to come and pick up my watch. So in I go to collect it. On arrival and I am informed that Cartier has said that they cannot mend the watch under the lifetime guarantee because they believe the watch has been ‘knocked’.

Now first of all I cannot recall the fateful knock – but the chances are that a watch is going to get ‘knocked’. For hell’s sake it’s a watch that has wrapped around my left wrist for five years. Secondly, and this is the bit that really annoyed me, Cartier said that for £300 they could service the watch and that they felt that would fix the problem!!!

There is no way that I am going to pay Cartier another £300 to get that watch fixed. I am not sure if I am cutting off my nose to spite my face here but I am really cross about the principle that I made this purchase with a belief in a globally renown luxury brand’s lifetime guarantee.

I have read the small print of the guarantee and it really does turn out to be a worthless piece of paper with ‘get out’ after ‘get out’ clause. I have tried to search the Internet to see if other people share my frustration – but you cannot find anything as Google searches just bring up thousands of pages selling either fake or second hand Cartier watches.

With hindsight I look back on the Cartier purchase as something actually embarrassing. In these current credit crunch times, as us Westerners feel a bit squeezed and our charitable donations have declined, there are millions of people around the world who are suffering as a result. That watch now symbolises something a bit obscene and what is wrong with the world in which we all lived a few years back...

• That I felt the need to demonstrate my worth by buying into the luxury myth - a watch shouldn’t cost thousands of pounds – it’s just plain dumb
• Big brands, such as banks and those purporting to be luxury are in many instances just hollow worthless shells – they have no substance or care for their customers and make them feel like duped fools

I am not a tree hugger (although I am sure that an embrace of a three hundred year old oak tree might help us put our small periods on this planet in perspective), however I do hope that as we all come out of this recession that we can individually and collectively wise up. That we recognise what is valuable, solid and worthy of our attention and investment.

Boy this post opened up a can of worms!