The end of 2008 saw some great strides. Joey was managing the best he could with his compound fractured arm. His long cast was able to be removed after 12 weeks only to be replaced with a shorter one that went from his hand to his elbow. His arm was so thin and scrawny when the longer cast was removed. He still had another month to go with the short cast and then rehab into the new year. What a process. He was able to start skating again and looked forward to rejoining his teammates, hopefully before the end of the season. We would sell our house in UM shortly and begin the moving process to Doylestown. A lot going on.
Meanwhile, I was concentrating on the holiday season as it had been really busy at the store leading up to December. The 2008 holiday season would turn out to be the most lucrative month in Belaggio Jewelers history. We were slammed! Everyday, from Black Friday through Christmas Eve, we were busy. Inventory was flying out of the cases and I needed to bring in additional units of the usual big sellers to keep up with the demand! Diamond stud earrings, diamond tennis bracelets, custom colored stone jewelry, etc. It was crazy. My employees and I were spent after those four weeks. The coffers were full though and that always made going into the new year of business much less stressful. Of course, I would need to fill up the cases after the New year. Spend, spend, spend again. That’s the jewelry business.
Something else was happening in our industry beginning in 2009. A phenomenon that had only occurred once in my lifetime and a few years before I entered the business. The price of gold per ounce was rapidly spiking upward. Back in the early 1980’s, the price per ounce of gold jumped up about three hundred percent. It was a short lived spike but many Jewelers capitalized on the moment and were able to make some big money. Now, the same phenomenon was occurring as the US stock market began crashing along with other economies around the world. The go to investment in times like these is to buy gold as a safe haven for one’s portfolio. The trend upward in the price of gold had already started to rise in 2007 and rapidly began to accelerate in 2009. From $600 per ounce, to $700 and $800 and $900 per ounce. It topped over $1900 per ounce a year later. The jewelry industry would begin to see a huge increase in the cost of gold jewelry, especially chains, bracelets and any style of jewelry that contained mostly gold. The retail cost of newly manufactured jewelry, per gram, was skyrocketing every day. On the other side of the coin, as the price of gold continued to climb, so did the scrap price. Scrap jewelry is essentially jewelry that is unwearable, broken, not worn anymore, unwanted, etc. The condition of the piece didn’t matter or the age. We purchased it by the weight solely for the gold content. The purity of the jewelry set the price based on whether it was 10 karat, 14 karat, 18 karat, 22 karat or 24 karat. The higher the karat, the more we paid out. 24 karat is pure gold and offered the best return for your weight. Most manufactured 24 karat jewelry came from India, the Middle East or other far Eastern countries. 18 karat came mostly from Italy and European countries and 14 karat and 10 karat were the standards of jewelry manufactured in the US.
For precious metal dealers, this was a real boon. A gold rush of sorts and it wasn’t ending anytime soon. The price just kept going up and up. People were selling their personal gold like crazy. Personal jewelry, coins, inherited jewelry, you name it. For my business, it was wonderful, just like all of the other Jewelers in our country. Our days were consumed with sorting, cleaning, weighing, calculating and paying for scrap gold. Platinum and Silver too. All commodity prices were moving upward. I was able, as far as my business was concerned, to finally catch up with many old bills that had been weighing me down. Obligations that I had accumulated during the long road that was fighting Leukemia. Missing so much time from the business hurt me terribly. It was a situation that weighed on me every day. Making positive strides was the outcome of a good year of business and the start of the modern gold rush. We paid very fair scrap prices to our customers and refined the proceeds every week to make some profit. The major downside of the rush though, was going to be an inevitable drop in regular fine jewelry sales. Customers were selling many of their precious heirlooms with no intention of replacing them for a long time. Especially at the inflated cost for new jewelry. For now, let’s hope the gold prices keep rising and the scrap keeps coming. Let’s also hope that the Stock market gets healthy and our economy too. That needs to happen real soon. Overall, our country was hurting. The gold rush helped many people during this time. Especially me.
Next Up: A Sad Return and Goodbye