 GOLD SPREAD: Prices offered for this braclet owned by the writer’s wife ranged from $46.78 to $200 |
First stop: A La Quinta in Coral Springs, where an outfit called Zohar was buying. A man in the small conference room off the front desk studied the bracelet with an eyepiece, scratched it on a black surface, dribbled on drops of solution and announced it was gold. He said he paid by weight and it didn’t weigh much. Offer: $60.
Ten minutes down suburban University Drive in west Broward, I found Mike’s Jewelry in a jeweler’s exchange. Mike looked at the bracelet with his eyepiece, said it was Asian and as close as it gets to pure gold. He offered me $190, plus the $10 for gas his ad promised. (Mike was spot-on with his Asia assumption — the bracelet had come from Hong Kong.) I told him who I was and asked how he arrived at his offer. “Be fair,” he shrugged.
Next stop: The next business day and 20 minutes away at Brian Fabrikant & Sons in an office building in suburban west Boca Raton. I had already interviewed Fabrikant by phone but hadn’t told him I would be stopping in anonymously to test out his prices. I sat in a chair at his desk, looking at a wall covered with certifications in various jewelry stone specialties while he examined the bracelet. “99.9% pure,” he says, and weighing 5 pennyweight. Pennyweight — 1/20th of a troy ounce — is the standard industry measure. He offers me $200, the same as Mike. I told him who I was. He said he had offered me $40 per pennyweight and expected to be able to sell it for scrap at $45 per pennyweight.
Lastly, I put the bracelet in a Cash4Gold refiners pack. The call center worker said she didn’t have information available about what Cash4Gold pays per pennyweight but she did say I would get an additional 5% added to my total for calling the day I did.
Nine days after mailing the bracelet to Cash4Gold and the day after I interviewed Aronson, my Cash4Gold check arrived for one 22-karat, 5-pennyweight bracelet in the amount of $46.78, including my additional 5% for calling the day I called. When I called Cash4Gold to ask for the bracelet back, the call center worker said the item was eligible for a price from Cash4Gold’s Estate Buyer fine jewelry division, which CEO Aronson says can pay more because it resells jewelry rather than melts it. That quote came 2?hours later: An additional $36.22 for a total of $83, still $117 below the best offer.
“Cash4Gold has made it clear, in its public statements and on its website, that it is not always the best price option for all customers. The company urges consumers to do their homework before selling their jewelry,” said Evelyn Iritani, a public relations adviser to Cash4Gold. “Its prices are competitive with others in the online gold-buying space, but consumers may be able to get more for high-quality jewelry at pawn shops or jewelry stores, which often resell the jewelry. However, once you sell your jewelry to those places, you cannot get it back.
“In cases such as yours, when a customer calls dissatisfied with the price, we frequently offer to have the package reviewed by our separate estate buyer division,” said Iritani.
Mike Riess, a director of Pensacola-based International Precious Metals Institute, also advises prospective gold sellers to do their homework: “If you have gold and want to sell it, check around. Don’t take the first offer you hear.’’
— Mike Vogel