Asia Watch & Jewelry lost money for three years before closing its 50-year-old Taipei shop

Asia Watch & Jewelry stood on Xiyuan Road in Wanhua, Taipei, near Longshan Temple and the Monga night market, for more than fifty years. The neighborhood watch and jewelry store was run as a family business, and its first employee, Uncle Liu, had worked there since his twenties — he was 80 when the shop closed, with more than fifty years of service. In the shop's heyday, three decades earlier, it was open from nine in the morning until midnight.

In late 2023 the shop posted a notice that it would close at the end of November. The reasons the staff gave were the economic downturn and the replacement of traditional watches by phones and smartwatches. Uncle Liu told reporters the store had been losing money for the past two to three years and that it was time to close. He described how customers now bought watches online and came to the shop only to have the straps resized.

Real-estate analysts quoted in the reports pointed out that the area's foot traffic was not the problem — Longshan Temple still draws crowds of tourists and worshippers, and the neighborhood is full of long-established shops. The closure reflected the retail format, not the street: a ground floor of about 30 ping plus a basement of roughly the same size, with rent estimated at NT$80,000–110,000 a month, serving customers who no longer needed a watch shop at all.