Archie (Carroll O'Connor): This here tells me that it's morning in China. So right at this moment, 800 million Chinks are sitting down to breakfast.
Mike (Rob Reiner): Archie, in the first place they are called Chinese.
Archie: That's what I said, Chinks.
Everyone likes a bargain, and Archie Bunker (Carroll O'Connor) was no exception.
And he rarely asked questions, especially if he was getting a really good bargain, such as the one he thought he was getting in the episode of All in the Family that first aired on this night in 1973, "The Hot Watch."
In that episode, Archie bought a watch from an acquaintance. The watch supposedly was worth $300, but Archie's acquaintance sold it to him for $25.
If Archie ever got a top–of–the–line commodity for a fraction of its price, Mike (Rob Reiner) became suspicious, and he was suspicious this time. He wouldn't accept Archie's suggestion that he had been at the right place at the right time — particularly when he learned that the person with whom Archie had made the transaction was a fellow from the docks, New York's "notorious grab bag" where valuable items disappeared only to reappear on the black market.
His suspicion grew deeper when Archie told him that the fellow who sold him the watch had been in jail once (and claimed to have been framed).
What Archie had, Mike told him, was a stolen watch.
To say Archie was skeptical would be an understatement, but seeds of doubt took root, especially when his watch started making a funny noise and then stopped working altogether when Archie did nothing more than hit the bottom of a ketchup bottle.
Archie decided to take the watch to a jeweler to be repaired, but he was dissuaded from doing that when Mike pointed out that the jeweler would compare the serial number on the watch to the list of serial numbers from stolen watches. If the number was on the list, Archie could be facing prison time.
So Archie needed to find someone who would fix watches "with no questions asked."
While he was trying to find such a person, Edith (Jean Stapleton) went ahead and took it to a neighborhood jeweler. Archie wasn't convinced that this jeweler would be as cooperative as Archie needed him to be, but he was reassured when the jeweler came by and told him the watch could be fixed for $21. He said nothing about it being stolen.
That was because no one would want to steal it. It was a fake. Archie thought it was an expensive Omega watch, but it was actually an Onega — with an N. The jeweler said it was only worth $8.
In one of the most entertaining exchanges of the series, Archie complained that being the victim of a racket cost him the equivalent of two weeks' take–home pay.
Mike pointed out that he was only out $17. He had spent $25 on an $8 watch.
But Archie was adamant that he had lost the equivalent of $300. He insisted that he was right.
"You want to be right?" Mike asked. "I'll show you how you can be right. You spend the $21 and get the watch fixed. You've already spent $25 so for a $46 investment, you've got your $300 watch back."
And that made sense to mathematically challenged Archie — at first. But then Edith reminded Archie that the watch was only worth $8.
