A Timaru man astounded to find his $4000 luxury watch doesn’t keep accurate time has been told this is completely normal and he isn’t entitled to a refund.
Wayne Golightly contacted TVNZ1's Fair Go after discovering his brand new Tag Heuer watch was running fast by over 100 seconds after just two weeks.
"I thought that’s quite a bit."
"Over six months this watch will gain 45 minutes and I thought that’s ridiculous."
Mr Golightly faced being early for everything so contacted Partridge Jewellers, where he purchased the watch.
Managing director Grant Partridge told Fair Go automatic watches such as Mr Golightly's would have time keeping tolerances and he should have known.
"Knowledgeable watch buyers like Mr Golightly are aware of the timekeeping tolerance of automatic wrist watches."
"We assume he accessed and researched this watch from the Tag Heuer website where there is a thorough explanation of the timekeeping tolerance of this particular watch of minus five to plus 20 seconds per day. This would be typical of most automatic self-winding watches," Mr Partridge said.
Tag Heuer tolerates their watches being wrong up to 20 seconds a day. In a statement, it told Fair Go that "mechanical watches are a legacy from the past therefore they will never be as accurate as a digital watch."
"The perception of what is accurate or not can be a very personal feeling and it is important to listen to the owner’s perception and at least, to try to adjust the rate and to show him the chronometry results."
Wayne thinks under the Consumer Guarantee Act, his watch isn’t fit for purpose.
"At the end of the day, a watch only has one job and that’s to tell the time. No matter how beautiful it looks it still has to do that one job."
Partridge Jewellers organised for Mr Golightly’s watch to be serviced at the Tag Heuer service centre. That helped the watch’s accuracy.
"They have improved it, I’ll give them that. It was running 45 minutes every six months now it’s going to run about 26 minutes fast every six months."
"The silly assumption that I had was that it was going to be accurate," Mr Golightly concluded.
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