A Phoenix man was able to earn a huge profit from a grossly underpriced watch after recognizing the rare piece at a Goodwill store.
Zach Norris knows his watches. So as soon as he spotted a 1959 Jaeger-LeCoultre diving watch at his local Goodwill store, he knew its real value would cost a fortune, AZFamily.com reported.
As it turns out, the price tag showed the rare timepiece to be an investment of $5.99.
"I didn't even want to give it to her scan," he said of his rock bottom-priced purchase. "I was like, 'You can scan it in my hand if you want to.' I just didn't want to let it go," he told KTVK-TV.
"Sometimes they just miss it, they don't know," said Norris, who will use some of the profit to help plan a wedding. "It's not a very fancy-looking piece. You have to know what it is."
Norris eventually sold the rare watch, sans wrist band, on Hodinkee.com, a collectors' website, to an aficionado in San Francisco for a whopping $35,000, and donated some of the profit back to Goodwill, according to New York Daily News.
"I knew I didn't want to keep it because it's kind of above my means to have a piece like that," he said. "I had a couple of good offers."
"We're planning a wedding," he said. "We've been a planning a wedding for a while, but now that we have the extra funds, we're going to go ahead and start taking care of everything."
"We're excited," he added.
Meanwhile, only 900 of the 1959 Jaeger-LeCoultre diving watches have ever been made, Norris said.
"I've found some stuff in the past that I have been really excited about and stoked, but this is one of those things you're like, one day, one day it will happen, and it happened for me."
