Why don’t you buy stones?
This is a question we get all the time, and for good reason. From a very young age we are taught to admire stones. We are taught they are very valuable. When we watch movies, we see every one trying to steal precious gems; this could be diamonds, emeralds, rubies or a whole number of stones. We always see advertising about the diamond or the ruby inside the ring or necklace or bracelet. You never hear the jewelry advertisement pushing the gold or platinum the stone is set in. So, as a society we have the perception that gems are worth a lot. In fact, most people believe they are worth thousands of dollars. And more importantly, most people believe the gems are more valuable then the gold surrounding the gem.
After buying gold for three years and seeing literally thousands of ounces of jewelry, I can tell you this is not the case. Every so often we will see a diamond that is worth a few thousand dollars. But the other 99.9% of the time, this is simply not the case.
We found this out at a very early stage of buying gold. We had a client that had, what she claimed to be: “rare-African diamonds.” At this point, we didn’t even have a diamond tester. We trusted the lady’s story and told her we had no use for the diamonds because we didn’t have anyone to sell them to. To get her business, we agreed to take the diamonds and try to sell them for her; for free.
What we found was very, very interesting. We thought there would definitely be jewelers interested in rare-African diamonds. So we picked up the phone and started calling all of the local, jewelers we could find. We were shocked. Every and I mean every conversation went exactly like this:
Hello, I have 4 rare-African diamonds I’m looking to sale.
Okay, are they at least a full karat each?
I’m sorry. Are you asking if they are each a full karat?
Yes sir.
No I believe they are only a quarter karat each.
Okay, then we are not interested in purchasing them.
But they are rare-African diamonds and look very beautiful.
Sorry sir, we don’t look at diamonds under a karat in size, sometimes we will consider looking at a diamond if it’s at least a half karat, but definitely not interested in a quarter karat no matter where they came from.
Okay, thanks for your help.
Every call when like that. So in our mind, diamonds had no value to us because we didn’t know anyone that would purchase them from us.
Fast forward a year. Since most people leave the diamonds in their jewelry, we do take them out and keep them because…well why wouldn’t you? A man finally came by our store. He said he was from Houston and would like to buy any loose diamonds from us. This was a first, so we thought, why not?
We had accumulated approximately 40 karats of diamonds at this point. He looked them over and offered us $300. Three-hundred dollars!!!! For a pretty decent sized bag of diamonds. We counter-offered $500. I mean hell, he was the only guy that was offering and we could have used $500!
He declined our office and left. We were in shock. Only $300 for this many diamonds…what is going on here? So from that day forward, we have decided to stay out of the diamond business. We are more then happy to pull out diamonds for customers that want to keep for various reasons, but we have no intention on purchasing diamonds to try and re-sale. I hope this clears up why we operate the way we do.
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