Recently a customer came through the doors of Berman’s Jewelers in Ellicott City to sell several pieces of gold jewelry. She had been to several other buyers to compare prices, and eventually accepted the offer of Berman’s owner Sam Fribush.
In conversation, she told him her reasons for parting with the bracelets and chains.
“She said, ‘I’m selling this gold to pay for pay for my heating oil,’ ” Fribush recalled. “I’ve seen happiness here, this is not a happy part of the business.”
A tarnished economic outlook has driven more area resident to sell their jewelry, precious metals and stones in recent months, local buyers and jewelers, he said.
Most of the items are far from diamond-encrusted heirlooms — they’re broken gold charm bracelets, high schools rings sold by seniors on fixed incomes and lower-end pieces, what one jeweler referred to as “mall jewelry.”
“I’ve had people who’ve come in here who were unemployed and needed the money, seniors who need a few more bucks,” said Stuart Tamres, owner of Talles Jewelers in Bel Air. “I had one woman who came in here to sell something to buy a carton of cigarettes, it was a high school ring.”
The price that sellers are getting for those precious metals has been on the decline. Gold reached a high of more than $970 an ounce earlier this year but has plummeted to below $720 an ounce by Thursday afternoon. Silver has also fallen, to $9.05 an ounce, and platinum is below $800 an ounce. Most dramatically, rhodium, a platinum-group metal used to finish white gold, rose to nearly $10,000 an ounce this summer before falling to $1,464 an ounce.
Precious metals generally become the investment of choice in tough economic time. But a lack of retail jewelry sales and decline in industrial uses of gold and silver may be the cause of the metal’s decline, said Daraius Irani, economist at Towson University’s Regional Economic Studies Institute.
Irani said the trend was a bleak economic indicator, heading into the holiday season and new year.
“If you’re selling jewelry or gold to get cash, it’s a very discouraging sign,” he said.
