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Welcome to the Esquire Endorsement. Heavily researched. Thoroughly vetted. These picks are the best way to spend your hard-earned cash.
I've never been weighed down by practicality in my enjoyment of watches? I don’t dive, so why would I need a dive watch. I don’t usually fly for work, never for pleasure, so I don’t need complex pilot’s watches or GMTs. And I’m not a man who gets caught up in the speculative side of things, so I couldn’t care less about any sort of price appreciation or depreciation.
Not to say I don’t enjoy the art of watchmaking; I think these brands—whether they pursue horological perfection or jewelry-like beauty—are doing some of the most holy work in the world. It’s just that I think a lot of us get caught up in the speculative side of things. We turn into kids wanting what we’re not ready for.
I saw this in real time a while back. I cut a deal with my nephew: If he passed seventh grade, I’d buy him a G-Shock, something way overbuilt for him. We went to the jeweler in the mall and he settled on one of the 2100 series. I made a point of asking the salesman to hold it for us, thinking that might stick in my nephew’s head. The little man didn’t pass seventh grade outright. (Smart kid—so smart that his homework is too boring and acing every test won’t fix that other 60 percent of his grade.) He passed through summer school.
So, I called the store in the mall and told them the G-Shock 2100 was a no-go, but I would buy him a lesser Casio instead, the A158. Time for a life lesson, kid: You have to do the simple stuff, and if we’re applying that to watches, nothing does it better than a Casio A158.
It’s Honestly Priced
In its original form, this watch released in 1989, but the version we know today actually released under Casio’s vintage line in 2009. That’s when I found it. I think it cost sixteen bucks back then. It was stuck in the window of one of the jewelers at the mall where I would hang out with friends. It could have been the price, could have been the way it was displayed, could have been the fact I would have bought any watch I could afford with my allowance money on that particular day. But I got it—the first step toward a lifetime journey of spending too much money on this sort of stuff.
The big thing, though, is that the price has functionally not changed all that much. Currently, you can grab this watch for $30 retail, but it’s almost always $5 cheaper than that on Amazon. Adjusted for inflation, the $16 I paid back in 2009 or 2010 costs about $25 now—given the way other imported consumer goods have been inflated, I’d say we’re doing all right. A kid on a weekly chores allowance in 2026 could walk into that same jeweler I did and say “Give me the cheapest Casio you got,” just the same.
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It Looks Just Vintage Enough
I tend to turn my nose up at a revived vintage style, but I make an exception here. It’s not trying to look weathered, and it’s not from an especially daring design period. It just feels of its original time. The touchpoint it makes me think about the most is Michael Mann’s Heat; it’s something I’d expect to see on the wrists of De Niro’s crew of bank robbers, worn inside the wrist since they spend most of their time staring down Colt carbines. The fact that I’m writing this as Heat 2 is in production is just a happy coincidence, and yes, I know that De Niro actually wears a Timex in the film. But Casio is the defining brand of the post-Quartz Crisis watch world. It’s the watch of a world in expansion: It’s cheap, functional, and well designed. Not something you’d want to pass down, but something you’d grab with your own cash and wear with reckless abandon. Maybe that’s why I imagine it on the wrists of career bank robbers.
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It Celebrates the Simple Stuff
A stopwatch that can do split time, alarm, calendar—the handful of functions are functions that a real person (not the side of me that’s a fantasy watch buyer or complications-obsessed collector) will actually use. That said, I don’t find it to be any less beautiful than those grail watches I still fantasize over. This thing sticks around in my life because it’s useful, but I find myself talking about it because of something more ephemeral. It’s the design with a lot of dead space, the slimness, and the significant taper on the bracelet.
Everyone outside the watch world is obsessed with bio tracking and smart wearables; everyone within the watch world is obsessed with speculative collecting and complications that are above my pay grade. None of us need any of that, and we could stand to strip it all back to the basics: A watch that looks good, and has a few functionalities that we need.
To bring this back to my nephew, he just sent me a picture last week that he had bought the G-Shock 2100 I wouldn’t buy him. I called him to get the story. Turns out, in the few weeks since I’d got him the Casio, he’d started a few hustles. Pokémon cards got sold, neighbors’ lawns got cut, and he made a few bets with friends (I told him I can’t condone that last one). He’d pretty quickly pulled together the $180 he needed to buy his G-Shock, and he bought it himself. I asked if he was going to ever wear this Casio again, and he said, “Probably not, Unc.” But a few days later, in a picture from their beach day, he was wearing the A158. Turns out he rotates between his two watches now. Just like me, he found this little Casio tough to get rid of.
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Photographs by Florence Sullivan
