There’s Gold in Them Thar Drawers!

Gold has sure enough gone crazy! It’s the main topic in the shop at this point in time. The last ‘Gold Rush” was in 2008 after the collapse of Lehman Brothers; in September, an ounce of 24 karat gold was only $692.50. By March of the same year, it hit a high of over $1,000 per ounce, and by 2011, it was at an all-time high of $1,900. Only just recently on October 17th, gold spiked to an astounding $4,381.58 per ounce!!!! As I write this column, it has dropped to $4,145.70.

As a young apprentice in the late 1960s the price gold was…wait for it…$35. Yeah, you heard that right, 35 measly dollars, about the same price as a trip now to Mickey Ds for a family of three. Yeah, yeah, a house only cost $23K and a loaf of Wonder Bread was twenty-one cents! Boy! Have things changed - today, an average driveway costs over 20K!

With the many questions about the crazy cost of things in an average jewelry store, my daughter Lindsay framed a cost evaluation of what has happened to the price of gold in just the past 10 years.

October 17, 2025: $4,381.58

One year ago: $2,666.00

Five years ago: $1,926.00

10 years ago: $1,183.00

When I arrived on Marco Island in Sept of 1994: $387.05

Needless to say, anyone who began hoarding gold in the 1990s - even if it was only a ten-ounce investment of $387 per ounce or $3,870 - the return today would be $43,000. (If you just forgot about it and let it sit for thirty years, not too shabby an investment, if you ask me.)

In the 2008 Wall Street disaster and the following three years or so, a lot of gold passed through my shop that was a combination of buying and selling; the buying was far beyond what I was selling to the public for many months. I could not hoard what I was buying; I had to turn it over to exist as a business - you know, pay rents, insurance, taxes, employee payrolls, supplies, and all the basic necessities of small business life.

And boy o’ boy did the American public not only sell their gold, they tried to sell anything that glittered; I had a guy come in insisting that his brass-plated reading lamp was solid gold! Those were crazy times… I’m sure you remember the sign swingers on street corners juggling “WE BUY GOLD” placards. Local papers were full of “We Buy” ads, and this was across the whole country. After a couple of years, the gold buying thing sort of faded out. Over the past years, I bought gold in dribs and drabs. Fast forward to 2025… the current county administration has so many rules and regulations about buying gold for cash from the public… I would have to hire two more people to fill out multi-page forms, take fingerprints, take a copy of the seller's driver's license, photograph the jewelry in question, and then spend hours describing every piece in detail on an online sheriff’s report, and to top it off, I’m required to hold the jewelry and my money for thirty days! All that to be legal in buying one stepped on gold earring from the public! No thanks. Today, I only take it in trade for new merchandise, custom work, repairs, or services.

The recent spike in gold has brought droves of inquiring folks with bags of stuff to the shop, “What’s this? Is it gold, and what’s it worth?” My staff try to be accommodating, but some folks just have too much stuff to go through, and most don’t want to pay us for our time and years of experience to pick through the good, bad, ugly, and just plain worthless chaff. The fact is, there is no set price for the gold you wish to sell; some pawn shops or gold buying shops will pay a fair price, some may not and pay you next to nothing. Some pay by the gram ( 31.1 =1 ounce), some by the pennyweight or DWT ( 20 dwt = 1 ounce). Some will weigh and not tell you the weight and just make a cash offer - make sure you know the difference! Plus, this is important…the fact that old gold jewelry is not pure gold…18 karat, 14 karat, and 10 karat only have a percentage of pure gold, which is 24 karat. 18kt. is 75% pure gold. 14kt. is 58.5% pure gold and 10kt. is only 41.7% pure gold, meaning the other percentages in the metals are other combinations of alloys such as brass, copper, zinc, silver, even nickel. And these mixtures create the color and strength of the gold. When gold scrap is melted under high heat during the refining process, the impure metals are removed, and what remains is pure 24kt. gold. The jeweler or gold buyer has to pay a fee for the refining process. In other words, if gold is let’s say $4,000 an ounce and you have an ounce of 14kt. gold, you will not get $4,000 for it (12kt. gold would have a market price of $2,000), and remember, 10kt. gold is like a tasteless meatball; heavy on the breadcrumbs and light on the meat. (41.7 % gold vs 58.3% worthless metals) In other words, different prices are paid for different karat jewelry.

I personally paid less for broken, worn-out 14kt. chains because they contain a great deal of solder when manufactured. When re-melted in my goldsmith shop, the workable or malleable quality of the gold was poor, because melted with all the solder, it lowered it to 12kt.and made it brittle and had imperfections when polished.

My advice to the sellers out there is to do your homework and shop around, especially if you have quantity to sell. Remember, you paid a fee when you bought ingots or coins. Your 24kt. gold ingot may reflect the current market price. Don’t be surprised if you are offered a certain percentage below market. It’s simple business, I’m not handing you two of my 50-dollar bills for your 100 dollars, the buyers need to make something… There is always the chance gold can drop the next day or next hour, for that matter. The buyer now loses money. Sure, it can also go up - in my life of gold transactions, it always went down when I needed to sell!

Be a smart seller.