Wristwatches Get the Back of the Hand

Is time running out for the wristwatch?

Surveys and sales data show that young shoppers are shunning watches for snazzier time-telling gadgets, such as cellphones and iPods.

Last year, the number of people who bought watches not in the Rolex and Patek Philippe stratosphere dropped 12% from 2004, according to a leading market research group. The runaway favorite brand for teens, Fossil Inc. of Texas, acknowledged an 18.6% decline in wholesale U.S. sales of its namesake brand.

Oakley Inc., which is based in Orange County, said watch sales fell 11% last year as it phased out digital watches and styles that weren't selling well.

For many in the cellphone generation, watches now seem about as relevant as grandfather clocks. Bare wrists were plentiful last week at the Lab, a Costa Mesa shopping center that caters to teens and young adults. Shoppers dived into purses or pockets to retrieve cellphones when a reporter casually asked the time.

You don't wear a watch?

What's the point? they answered.

"It's like a hat," said Francis Eagan, a 21-year-old waiter from Tustin. "It serves no purpose, like earrings."

Kamlyn Snyder said she hadn't worn a watch since she plucked one from a cereal box many years ago.

"The inconvenience of strapping it on in the morning," said the 21-year-old student from Huntington Beach, a pink bow tattooed on her right foot. "My grandma does; that's how she tells time. She's not that old. She's, like, 60, but still .... "

Many older people too would make the cellphone their primary timepiece if it didn't mean digging around for their reading glasses, said Marshal Cohen, chief industry analyst for the NPD Group, which tracks consumer trends.

"Once the cellphone manufacturers recognize that not everybody has X-ray vision, they'll begin to make the cellphone clock a little bit bigger and it will very quickly replace the fashion watch as the No. 1 timepiece," he said.

Cohen began polling consumers about watches after he realized that he had stopped wearing one a couple of years ago.

His conclusions were corroborated by the Piper Jaffray investment bank, which produces a semiannual report on teen preferences. In the latest study, teenagers who said they never wore a watch rose to 59% from 48%. The number of teens who said they wore a watch daily declined to 13% in this spring's survey, compared with 18% of those polled in the fall.