Nevada Focus: Employees have to change time on 20,000 watches

Daylight savings time ends Sunday at 2 a.m.

Maybe it is because it is so easy to lose track of time in Nevada that it is home to one of the world's largest watch stores.

Ray Lindstrom and Mac Jett have 20,000 watches on sale at The Watch Man store in the Riverside Resort Hotel and Casino on the banks of the Colorado River in this gambler's playground 90 miles south of Las Vegas.

On Saturday evening, the store will close and 30 employees will spend the night changing the time on every watch and clock.

Seniority carries big weight for the cumbersome chore. New employees are assigned to the ladies' watches, which have tiny stems and are known to cause sore fingers.

Donna Iannone is a four-year employee, so she gets to change the time on the huge wall clocks.

"We kind of get sore fingernails," she said. "Actually it's kind of fun. It takes us most of the night."

Do customers really care about the correct time?

"Why would a person want to buy a watch if it's on the wrong time?" Lindstrom asked during a tour of his store.

Lindstrom, 56, and Jett, 57, sell every watch for under $20. They're cheap, gaudy and people buy them. On a good day, they'll sell 1,000.

Every kind of watch you can think of - and even some you can't - can be found stuffed into the 3,000-square-foot store.

"Clocks on ties, clocks on purses, clocks on golf bears and teddy bears. Clocks on pens, ring watches," Lindstrom boasts.

There's a religious section with images of Jesus or prayer messages on watch faces. In the "alternative lifestyles" section, The Watch Man offers watches that say "Proud to be gay."

Others say "I love cooking," "I love bald guys," "I love tough guys."

"Just nutty stuff," said Lindstrom, who has a smaller store in Mesquite, 80 miles northeast of Las Vegas.

Watches with dice or cards cater to gamblers while watches with cartoon characters are popular with kids.

Lindstrom said one of the store's most popular designs is a caricature of President Clinton with a long nose and the message "Would I lie to you?"

In the "proud to be" section, variety abounds: "Proud to be a politician's wife," "Proud to be from Mongolia," "Proud to be pro-life."

There are sports watches, animal watches and tables full of Rolex lookalikes: fake gold, fake silver and some that are downright ugly.

"I've never seen so many watches," said Miguel Serrano, a tourist from Palm Springs, Calif. "It's amazing."

Lindstrom, originally from Phoenix, got the idea for the store five years ago "because I thought people liked watches." He bought 1,000 cheap watches and persuaded the Riverside resort to give him space.

They sold, and Lindstrom bought more.

After peddling the watches out of a banquet room for two years, he took on a partner and the store.

"I'll buy any kind of watch," Lindstrom said. "I may think it's the stupidest watch in the world, but the customers will buy it. There's something for everybody."

Besides the timepieces in the store, there are 20,000 others in a storeroom.

One of the trickier switches Saturday will be the two-faced watches showing Nevada time on one side and Arizona - which does not observe Daylight Savings Time - on the other. They have been in sync since March, but on Sunday, because Arizona and Nevada are in different time zones, Laughlin will fall an hour behind its neighbor across the river.

Lindstrom plans to change his own watch - an $800 Movado.

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