CH Premier Jewelers — Local services in Palo Alto

My wife, my dog and I stopped in as we wandered Stanford Shopping Center. I had a pretty simple question: what's it cost to get into Omega watches? 19 years ago, my wife bought me an entry level Seamster in stainless steel. I think it was $1500. Besides learning that there is no Omega at that price point anymore, I spent 30 min + looking at some amazing watches. The sales woman knew I wasn't going to buy, but still took the time to show me, and let me handle, watches from about $8k to a high of $16.5k. While I think one might be able to buy most of a city block in Detroit for that price, and paying more than 2 times the cost of the last three used cars I'd purchased combined for that one piece, she knew what she was doing. She was planting seeds. Maybe they'd grow, maybe not. My last job was as a COO of an Ai start up. If it'd made it to Series A with me still at the helm, sure, I'd have bought myself a nice way to expensive watch. It would have cost less than the rounding error on my new found wealth. Sadly, it's not gonna pan out, so no sale today. But who knows, the next job might, and the seed may grow. If it does, I'll be back. And it won't be to...

I have spent much time at CH Jewelers, not only buying my own Longines watch there, but bringing my son in, who has become a watch aficionado. Gary Ma, I believe the manager there, or at least the watch guru, spent endless time with my teenage son chatting about various fine watches and their various features. He was so kind and generous of his time, which is not universal, I can tell you. My son eventually bought one there. Whenever I have any issue, such as needing a new battery for my quartz one and sometimes to rewind / reset my mechanical automatic watch, he took care of me with the utmost patience, courtesy and professionalism. He also knows tricks about how to get the manual watch working again when others, including jewelers, don’t. He’s a whisperer. Any time we need a new watch or other services, we will always go to Gary first....

I walked in to CH Premier last Sunday, looking for a watch. I first looked at JLC moon phase and the sales told me it's hard to get piece(I don't think it's genuine to push customer for a sale with inaccurate information, we all know how easy to buy a JLC entry model). Then I looked for a VS Overseas, was told that I need to spend 60k+ then I'll be put on a waitlist without timeline, just ridiculous! If it's not because of Nautilus and Loyal Oak, Overseas is on discount, even now, you can buy brand new with just little extra effort. This is just not the right way to do business, especially for luxury goods, without luxury experience, nobody doing business here. Just...