‘Antiques Roadshow’ Guest Shocked by Value of Everyday Item

One Antiques Roadshow guest had been carrying around tens of thousands of dollars on his wrist for decades by the time he got his Rolex watch appraised on the PBS show.

In a recently resurfaced Roadshow clip from Season 22, the guest said his uncle had purchased the Rolex watch at Tiffany & Co. in New York in the mid-1960s and gifted it to him in 1975 after the uncle realized his nephew didn’t have a watch to wear at college. “Unfortunately, he passed away a few years back, but he was always one of those people who always like the newest things,” the guest explained.

The guest said he had worn the watch almost every day since, but he didn’t know much about it. He only found out it was a Rolex GMT-Master, for example, when a jeweler commented on it during a flight. But the guest had the good sense not to let Rolex service the watch and replace the original, Tiffany-branded watch face.

“It was especially interesting to me that the watch was purchased at Tiffany’s in New York, and I thought that was a really wonderful feature about the watch,” the guest explained. “And I knew that if they replaced it, it wouldn’t have that, and I thought that was especially unique.”

Antiques Roadshow/YouTube

Peter Planes of Royce Estate Buyers, Inc., in Palm Beach, Florida, the appraiser in the Roadshow segment, told the guest the watch was probably around $275 to $350 when his uncle bought it in the mid-1960s. The watch has distinctive features, including the gilt dial, an underline on the watch face, and the Tiffany & Co. branding.

“Tiffany no longer sells Rolex watches,” Planes said. “They used to sell Rolex watches, but one day Rolex decided that they didn’t want to print the Tiffany name on the dials anymore. Tiffany took the stance that, ‘We’re a brand name, and we don’t want to sell anything that doesn’t have our name on it.’ So they took the corporate decision not to sell Rolex anymore if they could not have their name on the watch. The fact that it has the Tiffany name on the dial adds to the collectability of the watch.”

Planes said that if the guest had had Rolex service the watch and replace the faded bezel insert and the dial, the watch would be worth $10,000 to $12,000 today. But because the watch still has its original components, it’s worth $50,000 in the retail market.

“Oh, good grief,” the guest responded. “That’s, uh… that is absolutely stunning to me. I mean, I think the highest I ever heard was $30,000, which I thought was crazy and outrageous, but the fact that it’s worth $50,000 is startling to me.”

On YouTube, commenters praised the guest for cherishing his watch and wearing it every day — and praised the Roadshow camera operator who zoomed into the guest’s watch tan line when he said so.