Thrift stores, yard sales, flea markets, library book sales…there’s something exciting about unearthing a hidden gem you wouldn’t find anywhere else. It’s a feeling you can’t get from ordering online or shopping at a typical retail store. Maybe it reminds us of our hunter-gatherer roots. You can imagine one of your ancestors picking through a forest of bitter leaves and poisonous mushrooms for hours, and then suddenly coming upon some tasty berries or nutritious nuts. I imagine it’s the same thrill you get from stumbling upon a rare first edition hardcover at a library book sale or a vintage designer tie at a thrift store.
Pawn shop finds light up the same part of the brain. They’re every musician’s first stop when hunting down a rare piece of gear, every gamer’s go-to store when searching for a vintage console cartridge, a hardware store for builders on a budget, an electronics store for audiophiles looking for something to play those CDs and cassettes on. And it’s every hobbyist’s first stop when it’s time to sell that item to fund their next purchase.
They can serve the same purpose for jewelry lovers. Most of us have a combination of vintage, luxury, and everyday fashion pieces in our jewelry box. There are the Art Deco earrings we inherited from grandma and the designer necklace we got for a special anniversary, and then there are the pieces we buy for ourselves to wear every day. They’re good pieces, real gold and silver, and would stand the test of time, but they might not be particularly dear to us, and they fall out of favor as fashions change by the season, the year, the decade. What do you do with these old pieces?
For most of us, they languish in a tangle in a forgotten drawer of the vanity, or we give them to friends. Nobody is going to throw gold in the garbage, but most of the time, selling these pieces is too much of a hassle to bother. If you don’t want to put them on ebay or trust one of those “we buy gold” commercials, what do you do?
That’s where pawn shops come in. It might not be the first place that comes to mind, but this is one specialty of pawn shops. Precious metals are valuable commodities, and the pawn business is a competitive one. Those two factors mean that pawn shops are always looking to give their customers the best deal possible on their unwanted gold and silver jewelry. Pawn shops will then send that jewelry to a refiner like us for processing. We work with gold, silver, and platinum, but our reputation is the most valuable thing we have. Our analysis methods ensure that pawn brokers receive the most fair and accurate settlements possible.
The metal we buy from pawn shops is then recycled into new products, whether for the jewelry industry or other industries. When consumers sell their old jewelry to pawn shops, and that jewelry cannot be resold, we step in to recycle it, thus reducing the environmental harm caused by mining.
