Lex Stolk writing for Fratello:

With nearly everything being instantly available, things that aren’t have become more interesting. And valuable. The waitlist or the queue outside the luxury boutique tells us the waiting game targets new luxury consumers. People who are familiar with luxury don’t want to wait. But a new generation that grew up with instant availability sees things differently.

Referring to the “pre-Insta” years when scarcity was a non-issue for mass-produced timepieces:

Those days will never come back.

Instagram has unquestionably been a double-edged sword for the watch industry. It’s increased the size of the pie and forged new relationships on a global level in a way that wasn’t previously viable. At the same time that it has broadened the population of watch culture, though, it has also homogenized and gentrified it. In subtle, myriad ways—not exclusive to the watch sphere—social media has stripped away the joy in things, leaving behind a wanting façade of the real deal.