In which I feel suddenly out of sync with technological trends.

[brooksmoses]

My watch has started losing time, which I'm fairly sure means it needs a new battery.

This should be fairly simple, right? It's a standard watch battery size, and while department stores and the like have stopped replacing the batteries when you buy a new one, I can do that part. Just need to stop by the store and buy a battery.

The first indication that this would not be so simple was this morning, when I stopped by the grocery store. It turns out that grocery stores, or at least the one I go to, have stopped carrying watch batteries of any ilk. So that was a bust, but at least a straightforward one.

This evening, I stopped by Fry's, which is our local "electronics superstore" -- sort of an small-local-chain equivalent of Best Buy except that the Sunnyvale store is at least twice the size of any Best Buy I've ever been in. Their website said they had the right size in stock. However, the store itself is ... well, first off, the electronic components and suchlike shelves gave me an immediate understanding of why the first Google autocomplete suggestions for "Sunnyvale Frys" was "closing". They are not closing the store, to my knowledge, but Orchard Supply had more stock on their shelves until the last week of their two-month-long going-out-of-business sale. The small rack of watch batteries, in the middle of a mostly-empty aisle, did have stock on most of the pegs. But they did not have a peg for either the claimed-in-stock 2-packs of 377-size batteries (which cost $2.99 online), or a peg for the claimed-out-of-stock single packs (which cost $0.99). They did have a rather sad, old, and battered-looking "check the size of your watch battery" display/tester thing sitting on top of the rack -- and I looked, and essentially all of the sizes that it had on it did not correspond to anything they had a peg for, and vice-versa.

So, I then went to Target, which also claimed to have them in stock on their website. I didn't see them on the rack in the "electronics" section -- although they did at least have watch batteries there. The helpful attendant in the section tried to find them on his little phone-sized handheld inventory-searching device for me -- as he noted, there were something like 8 or 10 battery displays around the store, and it could be on any of them. He didn't find them with any of the obvious searches (and, for some reason, the device converted his search on "377 battery" to "377 Batterybattery"), but eventually we tried "377 watch", which worked and gave the location as "checkstand 20". It was not at all clear what it meant, given that the checkstand numbers only go up to 14, but there was a battery display next to one of the checkstands, with different watch batteries on it, and a square mobile "battery" display rack in middle of the aisle near the checkstands that had yet different watch batteries on it. Neither of these had a peg for 377 batteries, though.

And this all leaves me with the realization that in the very few years since I last tried to buy watch batteries, watch batteries have basically stopped being a thing people buy with any regularity. People who want wristwatches get rechargeable smartwatches, I guess, which has rather quickly killed whatever part of the watch market was left after cellphones became popular. I'm left with the thought that fiddly mechanical watches will probably keep running long after the durable and simple and reliable quartz electronic ones are unusable for lack of batteries, and also the more relevant thought that I feel unexpectedly completely out of step with "normal" in a way I wasn't at all expecting to.

Anyway, I ended up ordering a replacement from Digikey. Although I see that there's also a reseller on eBay who's somewhere in Sunnyvale (probably closer to me than the Fry's is) and will sell me a box of 200 of them from China for $19 including shipping.

It's a weird world.

Comments

[ewt]

Over here if I wanted to buy them in person I would get watch batteries at a watch repair place (which is usually also a keycutter and a shoe repair place); or, if that didn't work out, try a jeweller. It wouldn't occur to me to look in a grocery store; Maplin was our electronics chain but they closed, partly because their prices for things like watch batteries were higher than they should have been.

I suspect this is more a case of "inventory that is super easy to post, so online makes lots of sense" than "nobody buys watch batteries anymore", though the latter is at least part of it.

[redbird]

The last time I bought watch batteries, it was at a drugstore, and they kept them near the pharmacy counter, in their alternate role as hearing aid batteries. But that was a few years ago, so may not be currently useful.

(I don't wear a watch because I don't like the weight on my arm when I type; cattitude has a mechanical watch he's fond of, and some kind of smartwatch that they gave us free for signing up for FiOS. What a world we live in.)

[cjsmith]

I wonder whether in-person sales of watch batteries might still be easier in a geographic area with a lot less disposable income on average.

That said, last time I got 377s was at Fry’s. Interesting note that the display there didn’t have a place for them.

[sraun]

I agree with redbird - I found watch batteries at my local Walgreens drugstore. They had them in two places - by the pharmacy, or near the photo department.

[kiya]

I saw a twitter thread recently that's basically about the death of retail - that huge number of stores are like this, no longer selling stuff that's why people go there and filling up the space with crap that nobody buys so it doesn't look empty. So I don't know whether it's "watch batteries" or "actually the economy is a zombie that hasn't noticed it's falling apart yet"....

[epi-lj.livejournal.com]

I've been very frustrated with inventory systems of late. I recently wanted to replace the gate latch on our gate. Our gate is slightly unusual, like everything about our house, as it was built by the former owner who was a handyperson of the "just enough knowledge to be dangerous" variety who really liked to wing it. Looking at Home Depot and other similar sources online, I found many latches that I liked, but all were marked as being things you could only obtain in-store, not online, but which were also out of stock at all stores. When going to stores under the premise of, "Well, let's see what they actually have," I encountered displays similar to the one you describe where many lovely latches were shown and their features compared, but none of them corresponded to any of the actual latches being stocked, nor were there empty spaces corresponding to the advertised-but-out-of-stock models or the on-the-chart-but-not-apparent models.

I think one of the issues is that there's been a move from inventory systems being a tool for consumers to get information on what's in store toward them being purely an advertising vehicle. In the latter scheme, the goal is to advertise as many products as humanly possible so as to give the impression that you have a greater breadth of stock than the competitor and/or to support the idea that you could potentially buy everything you need there.

(This seems broadly connected to the overall movement for all stores to become everything-stores. See also: Best Buy adding an Amazon-like "marketplace" feature which allows third parties to list items for sale through their website, including items entirely outside of the expected areas of coverage for Best Buy.)