What was advertised in a revolutionary American newspaper 250 years ago this week?

“Repairing or cleaning WATCHES … entirely free from the old Fleecing Method.”

John Simnet’s notices became a fixture among the advertisements that appeared in New York’s newspapers in the first half of the 1770s.  The watchmaker migrated from England to Portsmouth, New Hampshire, in the late 1760s.  He spent about eighteen months there before moving to New York.  During his time in New England, he published a series of cranky notices that more often than not engaged in a feud with a competitor, Nathaniel Sheaff Griffith.  When Sinnet arrived in New York, he continued with the cantankerous advertisements, sometimes commenting on rival watchmakers in general and occasionally singling out a new competitor for the same sort of abuse he previously heaped on Griffith. Such behavior certainly made Simnet fun for the Adverts 250 Project to cover a couple of centuries later!

As the imperial crisis intensified in 1774, Simnet refrained from doing anything too outrageous in the public prints, but after fighting began at Lexington and Concord he demonstrated that he still had that spark.  Most advertisers, including his fellow watchmakers, usually promoted their own goods and services without mentioning their competitors.  Even when they proclaimed that they offered the best quality or the lowest prices, they did not intentionally denigrate their competitors.  Simnet, on the other hand, relished doing so.  In an advertisement in the May 4, 1775, edition of Rivington’s New-York Gazetteer, he mocked “what others think moderate or reasonable Terms,” suggesting that his peers who repaired and cleaned watches charged exorbitant rates for services poorly rendered.  Such work required yearly maintenance.  Simnet offered a superior alternative, cleaning and repairing watches such that they “perform much truer” and “retain their original Beauty much longer.”  Clients who availed themselves of his services liberated themselves from “the old Fleecing Method of paying by the Year.”  The watchmaker made clear that he believed his competitors cheated their customers, either by design or through a lack of competence.  When it came to having their watches repaired or cleaned, prospective customers did not “need be at an considerable Expence” if they entrusted the work to Simnet, watchmaker “From Clerkenwell, London,” rather than any of his inept competitors whose training and experience all took place in the colonies.