Price of gold makes selling jewelry profitable

Price of gold makes selling jewelry profitable ; An elderly lady walked into a Jewelry Warehouse store in Lexington County recently wanting to sell her gold jewelry. She left with $3,000 in her pocket, according to store manager Scott Satterfield.

“She said she was buying $500 worth of medicine every month,” Satterfield said, recalling the story the woman had told him. “’I can buy six months of medicine now,’” she said. The U.S. economy is still a tough go for a lot of people.

And gold?
“The price of gold is crazy,” said Satterfield, who buys the precious metal from walk-in customers every day, or swaps the amount of gold determined to be in their jewelry, at its going value, for other merchandise in the store.

It’s the customer’s choice.

More and more Americans are selling their unwanted or unneeded gold jewelry these days, and in some cases their precious heirlooms, too, experts say, to make a buck.

The driving factor for some is the soaring price of gold, which closed Tuesday at $1,383.86 an ounce – too tempting for some people to pass up.

But in other cases, it’s the bare necessities of life.

Satterfield and other local gold dealers say people come in to trade their gold valuables because they are behind on their mortgages, can’t afford to pay for the medications or can’t play Santa Claus.

Sometimes, though, they just want to get rid of old jewelry they no longer want.

“We all need money, right?” asked Nathan Picow, a long-time jeweler and gold buyer at King’s Jewelry store in downtown Columbia. “We have to buy gasoline, we have to buy groceries, we all need money.”

Picow said selling gold is a legitimate way for the public to get what it needs – cold hard cash, or newer, more updated jewelry.

Everybody, it seems, is in the gold game now, from pawn shops to fly-by-night gold dealers to furniture stores.

So, when customers decide to sell their gold, creditable buyers will do a couple of things, Satterfield said.

First they will determine how much gold is in the item the customer wishes to sell, either 10 karats, 14 karats, or 18 karats, then determine its weight. Jewelry owners can check the content of the gold in their jewelry by the inscriptions on it.

Next, the jeweler gets a spot price for gold at the time, and based on that calculates the value of the jewelry.

The customer can then accept the offer and get paid, reject it and go to another dealer, or go home and wait for prices to climb more. The customer can accept cash or trade the value for something else in the store.

“A trade will work if I have something to trade it for,” Satterfield said. “You get more with the trade.”

When jewelry is traded, most of it goes to a refinery to be melted down, and in today’s market, that too, is big business. “For many jewelry stores, the No. 1 vendor is the scrap refiner,” Satterfield said.

But the company has a business model with respect to gold, Satterfield said, and it’s purely a personal business decision for the company. “I will never take an item we buy, polish it up, and resell it,” Satterfield said.

It is not uncommon for customers to call the store every day to check on the price of gold, and some customers “play” the gold price market much like Wall Street traders “play” stocks on the New York Stock Exchange, Satterfield said. For potential gold sellers locally, Satterfield sounded a note of caution and urged people to use common sense.

At the Jewelry Warehouse, for example, Satterfield said every piece of jewelry that comes in to the store for sale or trade is photocopied. “We are not a fence,” Satterfield said. “We are not out to get people’s valuables.”
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