Last week I dropped off my wife's CA M1 for a battery service at the Manhattan Boutique. The watch had a full overhaul about two years ago from BUSA at the cost of about $500. It just stopped and I suspect that the battery is toast. When I dropped it off, I was told that it had to go to Wilton and that I would get an estimate in about 8 days. Having had many many Breitlings serviced at Wilton, I knew the drill. Indeed, the last two times I never got a call or email and after two weeks had to call BUSA to find out what was going on with the service. When I asked if someone at the Boutique could simply do the battery service, the answer was no...even though in the past they did just that on one of my B-1s. The sales person did repeatedly try to sell me a new watch though...
Yesterday, I brought my daughter's Omega Seamaster Quartz to the Manhattan Omega store. It had also stopped. The service technician, Danny Avizov, could not have been nicer or more of a "watch guy" and said that they would look the watch over in-house and if it needed just the battery and/or seals, they would do it there. That Seamaster is well used and shows that number one daughter wears the crap out of it to the point of never taking it off. Given what the watch looked like, Omega could easily have talked me into a full service. That being said, at 7:00 PM I received a call from Danny that the watch only needed a battery, the seals were just fine, and they had replaced some tubes and pins in the bracelet that looked a bit worn; all for the princely sum of about $30...I had a similar experience with a battery change on an X-33 Skywalker. It was out of warranty by about a month but Omega happily changed the battery at no cost and then warrantied the new battery for another two years; all in about an hour.
The difference could not be more dramatic and it really makes me want to find an Omega that I can actually bind with for the long haul. It certainly validates my decision to start selling off the Breitlings that I do not wear much, especially the SQ versions, rather than hold on to them and get killed every few years when they need service.
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