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People Got Pepper Sprayed at a Mall Over a $400 Swatch Watch.
The release of the Audemars Piguet x Swatch Royal Pop watch collection triggered mob scenes, police intervention, pepper spray and four arrests at malls worldwide, with resale prices already hitting $2,000 the same day.
Wild footage shows a Long Island cop pepper-spraying a rowdy mob swarming a mall in a panic over Swatch watch release. Instagram/@gg.chang
At 1:40 in the morning, hundreds of people were already packed into Roosevelt Field Mall on Long Island.
They were not there for a sale. They were not there for a concert. They were there for a watch that costs $400.
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By the time the sun came up, someone had been pepper sprayed, four people were under arrest and 19 Swatch stores around the world had shut their doors for safety reasons.
This is what happened when Audemars Piguet and Swatch released the Royal Pop collection on May 16.
Audemars Piguet normally sells timepieces starting at $30,000. Swatch sells colorful bioceramic watches in the $350 to $400 range. The Royal Pop brought both together in a pocket watch format with a lanyard, priced at $400 to $425, available in store only.
The combination of an iconic luxury brand and an accessible price point created something nobody fully anticipated.
Video from Roosevelt Field Mall shows a police officer blasting pepper spray directly into a packed crowd of people, with startled shoppers stumbling away rubbing their burning eyes.
Over a watch. A $400 watch. At 1 in the morning.
Nassau County Police said they responded after store staff called for help as the crowd became impossible to manage. Officers arrived at 1:40 a.m. The Nassau County Police Department told reporters it will not tolerate disorderly behavior and takes the necessary steps to maintain public safety.
Four people were arrested. One on a second-degree assault charge.
But Long Island was not even close to the only place this happened.
Swatch stores worldwide were overwhelmed by the release. Locations across the globe reported scenes of chaos as crowds surged for the limited edition collection.
Some stores closed early because of safety concerns. Swatch later put out a statement acknowledging the high demand and confirming that certain locations shut down in coordination with security staff and local authorities.
The SoHo store in New York never opened at all. Nineteen stores closed on Sunday alone.
If you have followed this far, here is the part that makes this whole situation even harder to process.
By the same day as the release, watches were already hitting resale markets at over $2,000. A watch that retails for $400 was flipping for five times that within hours.
So the people getting pepper sprayed in a mall at 1 a.m. were either genuine collectors who wanted a piece of watch history, or resellers who saw a $1,600 profit margin and decided a Long Island parking lot at midnight was worth their time.
Either way, someone went home with burning eyes and no watch.
The Royal Pop collection references Audemars Piguet's iconic 1972 Royal Oak design alongside Swatch's 1986 POP watch line. It comes in bright green, yellow, red, navy and white colorways. Swatch warned fans not to rush stores and said the collection would remain available for several months.
That warning came after the pepper spray. Not before.
The world is in the middle of a war. There is an Ebola outbreak with no vaccine. A nuclear plant just got hit by a drone.
And on Saturday morning, someone got pepper sprayed in a mall on Long Island because they really, really wanted a colorful pocket watch on a lanyard.
That is where we are right now.
Editor's Note: The Royal Pop release chaos is a case study in what happens when luxury brand cachet meets mass market accessibility and artificial scarcity. Swatch has been through this before with the Moon Swatch collab in 2022. They knew demand would be extraordinary. The question of why in-store only releases continue to be the chosen format, when the outcome is consistently this predictable, deserves an answer.
