The rise in the price of gold over the past 20 years has caused a lot of people to think more about selling their old jewelry. In this Video we explain why more people are now selling their gold.
Let’s just talk a little bit about how the company came to be, how you had a kind of a weird experience with these mail order Sell Your Gold To Us in some bizarre place. It’s just not it’s not face-to-face and a lot of people especially now with gold.
Charlie, when you what started the company you see you talked earlier gold was worth about we set about 300 bucks and ounce and then you watched it grow to 600 and went: ”Whoa, ok.” Now it’s worth a thousand dollars more than that an ounce. It’s up around 1600 bucks an ounce.
An amazing climb in value, over such a short period of time.
Charlie: Yeah, the last ten years of just been an unprecedented for what’s happened with gold price. It was sitting around 300 an ounce from the 1980’s till about 2000. We started the business after that climb started because that’s when it really became worthwhile to dig through your old gold but now that it’s kind of continued on that same trend for the last for the last couple years so it’s now at 1600 dollars an ounce roughly, 5 or 6 times what it was when a lot of people would have bought their gold.
Stirling: I think Greg, that that causes people to think about selling more so when you know its 1600 buck an ounce on the open market. Maybe I’m sitting on something that may actually have some real (value). I’ve got to do this cleaning, I’m either going to throw this stuff out or maybe I should go have it appraised because at 1600 bucks an ounce it’s… worth my time and effort. You get quite a.. quite a colourful group of people coming in with gold. So let’s talk about what sort of gold you accept.
Because all I’ve talked about so far is rings and jewelry pieces and I have a feeling that only represents a small portion of your business .
Greg: It does vary quite a bit. I mean we’re seeing people basically that are bringing items in that they don’t really have any want or need for any more … and with the price of gold so high, you know, the threshold for what is worthwhile hanging on to what’s not starts is a little bit lower. If you’ve got something that’s been sitting there for 10 years and you don’t think that you’ll be wearing it again for other ten years then really at 1600 dollars an ounce is probably pretty good time to cash it in and use that money for something else.
Stirling: What if it’s kinda ugly and old and I would never have worn the darn thing in the first place but it was a gift, so what the heck?
Greg: No, you know to be perfectly honest we see a lot of ugly old jewelry and that’s fine, I mean that’s what were in that that’s for a business to do is .. you know something that is broken or worn out … in terms of pure gold content isn’t worth any less than a perfectly brand new piece of jewelry.
So you know that’s a type stuff would actually prefer to see we don’t want people to have to be selling something that’s really nice and brand new and that they might want to otherwise want to keep.
Stirling: Right
Greg: Because, you know; the gold content in an item is going to be.. that only represents one part
of the value of it obviously.
Stirling: Charlie accuse me of being old and creepy if you will, but I’ve got to ask you this
what about gold teeth? Do people do buy teeth and the people bring teeth to your store?
Charlie: Oh yeah we…
Stirling: They used to be really popular you know, back a generation before me that was – it was a very acceptable kind of thing to do – have a shiny gold tooth!
Charlie: Even though the gold teeth that.. so first of all to answer your question we see a lot of gold teeth. that’s almost a perfect example of what we buy it. It’s something that really of no use to you to keep and this is the perfect time to cash it in.
Stirling: Okay, alright.
Greg: and by the way, this is a tooth that’s already been taken out of someone..
All: Laughs
Greg: We don’t provide dental services at the store.
Stirling: There are no extraction services provided at Vancouver Gold. Good to know.
Charlie: The gold teeth we buy are not necessarily gold colour always, we do buy the white gold ones.
They usually have a little less gold content in them, but they’re. We buy it all basically.
Stirling: It sounds; judging by the expression on your face, sounds like it’s fairly commonplace?
Charlie, Greg: It is. Absolutely.
Stirling: Of course, of course. Gold is up and down. It’s a roller coaster ride and if you’re a gold person and that’s your retirement it could be a stressful .. holding, unless you’ve got lots and lots of it.
But in terms of the consumer… if you have this written estimate describing all of your
uh… submissions, that gives you a pretty powerful weapon if you are comparison shopping Greg, as you say a lot of people do. You can take that estimate from Vancouver Gold and run it by a couple of competitors and chances are you’re not going to get that thorough… a comparable returned quote are you?
Greg: Well certainly the other gold buyers in town they don’t have the same type of testing equipment that we have because what is all about. We have the capability to measure down to the thousandth of a percentile on our xray machines. We’ve got density machines. Our buyers are very highly trained in the in the art of testing gold.