Brian Cohen has been selling gold to customers for 25 years at Freedman’s Jewelers, but it wasn’t until recently that he thought it might make just as much sense to buy gold from the people who walked through the doors of his Olden Avenue storefront as to sell it.
Maybe it was when gold prices shot to record highs, hovering above $1,500 an ounce for pure gold. Maybe it was when the TV commercials started urging viewers to mail their jewelry to “cash-for-gold” businesses. Or maybe it was when people started coming into his shop with fistfuls of the stuff, wanting to trade it for extra cash.
At some point, (Cohen doesn’t remember the date) he tacked up signs that said “Cash for Gold” and officially got into the scrap gold business.
It works like this: customers come in with whatever broken or unwanted jewelry they want to sell. Cohen weighs it on a scale in front of the customer and offers them a price based on the weight and purity of the gold. Cohen then sells the gold to a refiner, who melts it down. If the jewelry is particularly nice, Cohen might hang onto it and sell it in a discount rack in the front of the shop.
Cohen would offer about $150 in melt-down value for a typical men’s wedding ring—far more than it would have been worth just a few years ago, he said.
Joe the Jeweler, owned by Zion Gola, opened up a Ewing branch of his after the boom in gold prices. The Philadelphia jewelry store has 13 branches now, most of them devoted to buying gold, which is melted down at Joe the Jeweler’s own refinery in Philadelphia.
Cohen’s shop differs from mail-in places and small “pop-up” cash-for-gold stores in that Cohen’s shop is an established business that still relies more on its jewelry repair and sales than the cash for gold trade.
“Lots of cash-for-gold pop-up jewelers are just trying to make a quick dollar off people that are unaware,” Cohen said. “Instead of ‘buyer beware,’ it’s ‘seller beware …’ We recommend dealing with a local jeweler. Honesty and the jeweler’s reputation should mean a lot to the seller,” he said.
Cohen said he had heard of shady dealers offering pennies on the dollar of what the gold was actually worth, or telling customers their gold jewelry was not actually made of gold, and urging them to put it in a “donation” bin.
Ewing resident Mary Schmidt recently sold some old bracelets, charms and broken earrings to Cohen in order to buy her husband a Tag Heuer watch for his birthday. She said she took the finery to Freedman’s on a whim after noticing the signs, and being surprised at how much it turned out to be worth.
Cohen said the high gold prices fueling the cash-for-gold business are not likely to last forever. He said customers have come in with items that were worth more for their melt-down value than what they paid retail several years ago. One man brought in a gold chain that was worth $11,000, he said, after he had paid $3,500 for it originally.
The business does have something of a dark side, in the form of people selling their jewelry not for the heck of it, but who are reluctantly parting with something valuable out of desperation.
“It goes both ways, I guess,” Cohen said. “Someone might bring something in and say, ‘gosh, I really hate to sell this, but I need to pay the electric bill.’ You hate to see that, but on the other side, at least they’re getting the money to pay their electric bill.”
Shai Cohen, a store manager for Joe the Jeweler, said most of his customers come in desperation, not by choice. His shop has been in the cash-for-gold business for 30 years.
“They sell to us because they’re in a desperate situation. They have to make their mortgage payments they can no longer make, or a car payment, or their children’s tuition. They are selling it to survive,” he said.
Many other cash-for-gold stands have popped up in recent years, jewelers having discovered that a good profit can be made from scrap jewelry, given the high price of gold. Joe the Jeweler has even started accepting silver to melt down. They take in so much jewelry, they don’t even bother to save particularly good items, Shai Cohen said.
Joe the Jeweler’s, at 1784 N Olden Avenue Ext, can be reached by phone at (609) 895-1950.
Freedman’s Jewelers has been a family business in Ewing for 45 years. It is located at 962 Parkway Ave. Phone: (609) 882-0830.
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