I want to start with a number. €920. That's the minimum wage in Portugal in 2026. Nine hundred and twenty euros a month. That's what a significant chunk of the Portuguese working population takes home — actually less, because after social security contributions you're looking at something closer to €750 in your pocket.
Now here's another number. €400. That's roughly what the new Swatch x Audemars Piguet Royal Pop costs. A pocket watch. Not a wristwatch. A pocket watch. In 2026. When nobody has worn a pocket watch since your great-grandfather stopped taking the train to the factory in 1947.
And here's the number that really makes me want to lie down in a dark room. €2,750. That's what one of these things was listed for on Vinted. From a Portuguese seller. On the same Saturday it launched. A watch that costs €400, being resold for almost seven times the price, on a platform that was originally designed for selling your old jeans.
So yeah. I have questions.
What actually happened
Last Saturday, May 16th, the Swatch Group launched the Royal Pop collection — a collaboration between Swatch and Audemars Piguet. If those names don't mean anything to you, here's the short version: Audemars Piguet makes the Royal Oak, one of the most iconic luxury watches in the world, the kind of thing that costs €30,000 in steel and over €100,000 in precious metals. Swatch makes colorful plastic watches that your mum wore in 1992. The idea of putting these two brands together is, on paper, completely insane.
But it worked. Oh, did it work.
The Royal Pop is a set of eight pocket watches — yes, pocket watches, the kind your Victorian ancestor used to check whether the 3:15 to Coimbra was running on schedule — that take the octagonal shape of the Royal Oak and wrap it in Swatch's pop-art aesthetic. They've got a mechanical Swiss-made movement called the SISTEM51, sapphire crystal on both sides, and they come in those typical Swatch candy colors that look like someone raided a bag of Skittles.
In Portugal, only two stores received them: the Swatch shop in Centro Colombo in Lisbon and the one in NorteShopping in Porto. Two stores. For the entire country. Ten million people. Two shops. And what happened? Around 500 people showed up at each location. Some of them camped OVERNIGHT inside the shopping center. In sleeping bags. On the floor of a corridor between a Zara and a Fnac. To buy a pocket watch.
I'll repeat that because I need to make sure you and I are both processing the same information: Portuguese people slept on the floor of a shopping center to buy a pocket watch that costs almost half a month's minimum wage.
The scalping circus
Now here's where it gets genuinely infuriating.
A massive portion of the people in those queues weren't there because they love watches. They weren't there because they're passionate about horology or because they've dreamed of owning a Royal Oak since they were kids and this is their only affordable way in. They were there to flip. To buy at €400 and sell at €1,500. Or €2,000. Or €2,750, which is the price one fuchsia-and-yellow model was listed for on Vinted from a Portuguese seller THAT SAME AFTERNOON. The watches went on sale in the morning and by lunch they were already on resale platforms at five, six, seven times the retail price.
People who were at the Colombo told Notícias ao Minuto there was confusion. The queue stretched through the corridors. Swatch had limited purchases to one per person, per day, per store — but what does that actually prevent? Bring four friends, buy four watches. Come back on Sunday, buy another one. The rule exists to make the brand look like they care, not to actually stop scalping.
On OLX, the listings started appearing before lunchtime. On Vinted, the same. On Chrono24, Portuguese sellers had models listed between €1,700 and €4,900. The Portal da Queixa had to step in and issue a public warning about potential scams — fake listings, counterfeit watches, fraudulent payment schemes — because when there's easy money to be made, the scammers are never far behind.
And the worst part? The Royal Pop is NOT a limited edition. Let me say that again because this is the detail that makes the whole thing collapse into absurdity. These watches are not limited. Swatch has confirmed they will continue to produce them. They told the ECO newspaper that they WILL return to Portuguese stores — Colombo and NorteShopping — though they couldn't give a specific date. They will be restocked. They will be available for months. Millions of units will exist globally.
So what we have here is people sleeping on floors, fighting in queues, all to scalp a product that WILL BE AVAILABLE AGAIN. The scarcity is artificial. The urgency is manufactured. And the people paying €2,750 on Vinted are essentially paying a seven-times markup for impatience.
But can we talk about what this says about Portugal?
This is the part that nobody seems to want to address, so I'll do it.
Portugal has a minimum wage of €920 a month. The average salary is around €1,615 bruto — before taxes and social security, which knock it down to roughly €1,200-€1,300 in your hand. Renting a one-bedroom apartment in central Lisbon costs about €1,336 a month. In Porto it's slightly less but not by much. A couple in which both partners earn minimum wage brings home around €1,500 after deductions. That's supposed to cover rent, food, transport, bills, and everything else.
In this country — THIS country — people are spending €400 on a pocket watch. And other people are paying €1,500, €2,000, €2,750 for the same pocket watch on the secondary market.
Let me put this in perspective. The person who bought a Royal Pop for €400 just spent 43% of their minimum monthly salary. Nearly half. On a pocket watch. That they're probably not even going to use because who the hell uses pocket watches in 2026? And the person who bought one for €2,750 on Vinted just spent roughly three full minimum wage salaries. Three months of someone's income. For a Swatch.
I keep coming back to this question and I can't find a satisfying answer: where is this money coming from?
Portugal is not a rich country. We know this. Everybody knows this. We're the country where young people live with their parents until their thirties because they can't afford rent. The country where entire families share a two-bedroom apartment in the suburbs because Lisbon's centre has been swallowed by Airbnb and golden visas. The country where teachers can't afford to live in the cities where they teach. The country where nurses go on strike because €1,200 a month isn't enough. The country that ranks 22nd out of 42 European countries in purchasing power. The country where 30% of workers earn minimum wage.
And yet. 500 people showed up at the Colombo. 500 more at NorteShopping. Some of them had been there since Friday night. Sleeping bags on the floor. For a pocket watch.
Something doesn't add up. And I think we need to be honest about what's actually going on.
The scalper economy and what it says about us
I think the honest answer is that most of those 500 people weren't buying the watch to wear. They were buying it to resell. They were making a bet: spend €400 now, sell for €1,500 later, pocket the difference. That's €1,100 profit for a night on a shopping center floor. In a country where the minimum daily wage works out to about €42 (before taxes), sleeping overnight on the floor of the Colombo to make €1,100 is, in cold mathematical terms, a very good deal.
And I get it. I genuinely do. When wages are low and opportunities are scarce, people find alternative ways to make money. Scalping is, in its most basic form, arbitrage — buying where the price is low and selling where the price is high. It's capitalism in its purest, most distilled form. I'm not going to sit here and pretend I wouldn't consider it if I knew I could make a month's rent in one flip.
But here's what bothers me. The people who end up paying for this system are always the same ones: the actual fans. The person who genuinely loves watches, who follows Audemars Piguet on Instagram, who thinks the Royal Oak design is beautiful, who got excited when they saw Swatch was making an affordable version, and who showed up at the Colombo at 7am only to be told it's sold out because forty guys in front of them bought one each with the sole intention of listing them on OLX before they even got home.
That person doesn't get a watch. Or they get to buy one for €1,500 from some bloke on Vinted who doesn't know the difference between a Royal Oak and an oak tree. The system rewards the flipper and punishes the fan. Every single time.
We've been here before
Remember the MoonSwatch? March 2022. Same brand. Same chaos. Same queues at the Colombo and NorteShopping. Same scalpers. Same artificially created urgency around a product that was eventually produced in the millions. Remember how MoonSwatch models were selling for €2,000 on day one? You can buy most of them now for under €300. Some are going for €180 on eBay. The market corrected itself because — surprise — the scarcity was never real.
The same thing is going to happen with the Royal Pop. It's already happening. The Leak website pointed out that the hype is dying because people are starting to realize these aren't limited. Of course it's dying. Because once the FOMO evaporates, the resale prices crash, and whoever bought one for €2,750 is stuck with a pocket watch that retails for €400 and a story about how they got played by the oldest trick in consumer culture.
And the saddest part? The people who'll get burned the worst are probably Portuguese. Because the ones paying inflated resale prices right now, in Portugal, are people who are spending money they probably shouldn't be spending, caught up in a hype cycle that was designed — from the ground up, by a Swiss corporation worth billions — to create exactly this kind of frenzy.
The social media machine
I think the real engine behind all of this isn't the watch itself. It's the content economy.
Queuing at the Colombo overnight is content. Unboxing the watch on TikTok is content. Filming yourself flipping it on OLX for triple the price is content. The watch is almost irrelevant. What matters is being SEEN. What matters is the story. What matters is the thirty-second video of you holding up the box with the caption "got it" and watching the likes roll in.
Portuguese Instagram and TikTok were flooded with Royal Pop content all weekend. People filming the queues. People filming themselves inside the store. People filming their wrists with a pocket watch awkwardly strapped on (because some genius is already selling custom bracelets to convert these into wristwatches for another €42 on top). The whole thing is a content machine disguised as a product launch.
And the algorithm rewards it. The more dramatic the queue, the more views. The more insane the resale price, the more engagement. The more people who share the post saying "can you BELIEVE this is selling for €2,750?", the more people who think "wait, maybe I should get one too." It's a self-perpetuating cycle of manufactured desire. Swatch didn't even need to pay for advertising. The consumers did it for them. For free.
The question nobody wants to answer
Here's what I keep thinking about and I know it makes me sound like an old man yelling at clouds but I don't care anymore.
How is it possible that a country where people protest about the cost of bread, where the price of a coffee just went up to €0.80 and it became national news, where people drive to Spain to fill up on cheaper groceries, where university graduates take home €900 a month and call it a good salary — how is it possible that this same country produces queues of 500 people outside a watch shop at 6am on a Saturday?
And I know the answer. I know the queues were mostly scalpers. I know most of them weren't spending €400 on a luxury purchase — they were making a calculated investment in a flip. I know the economics makes sense at an individual level. But the optics of it, the image of hundreds of Portuguese people camping overnight in a shopping center to buy a pocket watch while the news the same week reports that housing is unaffordable and emigration is rising — those optics are devastating.
It says something about where we are. We've built a society where the fastest way for a young person to make €1,000 isn't to work hard at their job for two weeks. It's to sleep on the floor of the Colombo and flip a Swatch on Vinted before lunch. That's not a moral failure on the part of the kids in the queue. That's a systemic failure. When flipping a pocket watch in one morning earns you more than two weeks of actual work, the problem isn't the flipper. The problem is the wages.
What happens next
The Swatch Group has confirmed that the Royal Pop will be restocked at Portuguese stores. The ECO newspaper reported that the brand said "they will return" but couldn't give a specific date. So the watches WILL be available. For €400. In a store. Without sleeping on a floor. Without paying some stranger on OLX three months' salary.
Which means anyone who paid €2,750 on Vinted last Saturday is about to feel very, very silly.
And the cycle will start again. The next collaboration. The next drop. The next limited-not-limited release that sends people into a frenzy because TikTok told them they needed it and the scalpers told themselves they could profit from it. Round and round we go.
In the meantime, the Portuguese minimum wage is still €920. Rent in Lisbon is still €1,336. A coffee just went up to €0.80 and the country had a meltdown about it. And somewhere in the Colombo, a security guard who earns €950 a month is watching people queue overnight to buy a pocket watch that costs almost half his salary.
I don't know what the moral of this story is. Maybe there isn't one. Maybe it's just the world we live in now, and a pocket watch is just the latest symptom. But if you're reading this and you're thinking about paying €1,500 for a Royal Pop on OLX — don't. Just wait. The watches are coming back. Your rent isn't going to pay itself.