By Thursday evening, the line outside the Times Square Swatch store resembled a small roadside encampment.
Not an unusual sight for anyone in the resale game, looking to make a hefty profit in the aftermarket off a coveted release.
Nearly half the block between Seventh and Eighth avenues was scattered with foldable camping chairs resting against police barricades. Trash bags, empty coffee cups and personal belongings littered the sidewalk.
A group of men took shifts holding spots while others hit the Marriott Marquis Hotel’s eighth-floor bathroom to clean up or get a quick nap in their car. One woman inched her chair closer to the store as she screamed, “I’ve been here for five days!”
A middle-aged woman with strawberry blond hair appeared to have overdosed at around 5:32 p.m. while waiting in line. Slumped over in her foldable chair, an NYPD officer arrived on the scene to revive her with Narcan.
All of this was for a watch that wouldn’t even go on sale until Saturday.
The frenzy centered on the latest collaboration between Swatch and Audemars Piguet — a limited-edition, bioceramic pocketwatch that merges Audemars Piguet’s iconic Royal Oak with Swatch’s vibrant POP line from the 1980s.
The retail price ranges from $400 to $420, depending on the colorway, but the resell margins were promising, with early offers into the thousands.
“You gotta have a lotta balls to be out here,” Luis M., a watch enthusiast and reseller behind HypedUpNYC, told The Post.
He and his crew had been camping outside the store since Monday. Although he resells everything, he wants to keep this watch.
Someone had already offered him $3,500 for it, though.
“You gotta know what you’re doing, to be honest,” he said.
Luis said the group rotates shifts overnight and uses nearby hotels to clean up before returning to the line.
“Once the store shuts down, we run home, shower, change,” he said. “My car’s right here — just making use of what we can do.”
But he and his friends were in good spirits near the front of the line and treated the waiting more like an informal backyard hangout, featuring blunts and Modelo.
Down the line was John McIntosh, aka “the parking pirate,” as he proudly claimed. He’s a known line-sitter — basically a sin in camp-out culture.
“I was there every day for the Diddy trial, Donald Trump …,” the bearded sitter told The Post, laughing.
McIntosh had only been there since the morning, but he was hoping someone would pay him to wait in line for them, so he could put that money towards his own watch, which he could flip. Though his eBay account wasn’t working and he had never heard of online marketplace StockX, he hoped that maybe a jeweler or tourist would want the limited-edition timepiece.
According to McIntosh, the NYPD had been surveilling the line over the past few days, ticketing some and threatening to remove chairs.
The concept of line sitting has become a common model to ensure access to exclusive product drops, sample sales or high-demand store openings. Professionals charge by the hour and can be found on sites like TaskRabbit or a kind of “if you know, you know” thing.
And in New York City, where there are lines for everything from bagels to sneakers, this practice has become a way for people to save time.
“It’s worth me sitting here,” said a woman in a cropped mustard yellow hoodie that said New York on it. Though this isn’t something she typically does, she told The Post, it was an offer she couldn’t refuse, which justified her being there since Monday.
And it annoyed her that McIntosh had seemingly gotten in front of her after only joining the line on Thursday.
“I get paid upfront,” she said proudly, but was reluctant to reveal just how much she gets paid.
“I’ve been here since Monday, and haven’t left,” she protested to McIntosh.
“It’s not worth fighting over,” he said.
At around 5:32 p.m., there was a commotion closer to the front of the line.
“She’s about to OD on heroin,” said one reseller, who had also been waiting since Monday.
A middle-aged woman in a black hoodie that said “New York City” was almost blue in the face as two NYPD officers called for reinforcements. After a few minutes, Narcan was administered, and she regained consciousness.
But according to the security guard at the front, the line was pretty “chill.”
Overdose aside, that is.
“Saturday may be another story,” he told The Post. “I won’t be here, luckily, but we’ll see — not for that.”
