Showing Love for our Pawn and Jewelry Stores on Valentine’s Day

The National Retail Federation (NRF) reports that planned spending on Valentine’s Day celebrations and gifts this year has dropped — most likely due to the pandemic. However, 18% of those buying special items will be choosing jewelry. There is a bright note in the report for local business, as the NRF also notes:

This year, online is the most popular Valentine’s Day shopping destination, visited by 39 percent, followed by department stores (29 percent), discount stores (28 percent) and local small businesses and specialty stores tied (17 percent). This year is the first time consumers listed small businesses as a top five shopping destination since the question was added to the survey in 2015.

Statista reports that as of 2019, there were around 19,800 jewelry stores throughout the United States, and the U.S. jewelry and watch market was valued at approximately 78 billion U.S. dollars that year.

We’ve already noted that local jewelers, gold traders and pawn shop owners are facing challenges due to the pandemic. However, they additionally face the daily challenge of valuating what they are buying and selling. Businesses require accurate results to remove variability and subjectivity to ensure a profitable transaction.

As our Valentine’s Day gift to our readers and all the local jewelry stores, pawn shops, and gold traders, we’ve listed below some resources that might help improve their bottom line, so they — along with their customers — can have a Happy Valentine’s Day.

• Technology:
  • One of the best ways to accurately assess if a piece of jewelry is made of gold, silver, steel, nickel, (or some other material) is to use an XRF precious metals analyzer. Many leading jewelers utilize these instruments to confirm precious metal content in various pieces of jewelry and other metal items they have in their shop. This X-ray Fluorescence technology is a fast, simple, nondestructive solution for precious metal analysis. You can identify and measure the metal content, as well as determine the presence and concentration of other trace, alloying elements, and dangerous heavy elements, which could impact health and the valuation of the pieces – not to mention how shiny, dull, or inflexible they may become.

• Blog Articles:
  • Beware of Precious Metals Fraud During Economic Uncertainty. Unfortunately, not all those metals coming into stores may be precious. There have been several reports that pawn shops were seeing spikes in fake gold jewelry scams.
  • Does Underkarating Matter? It’s not just the value of the piece that is a concern with underkarating. Metal alloys are created to impart many properties, such as strength, flexibility, machineability, and durability. It is important that the correct ‘recipe’ of metals be used in order to ensure that the finished piece doesn’t easily corrode or break.
  • Are XRF Precious Metals Analyzers Worth It? We’ve developed a simple payback calculator that determines the time to recover your investment in an XRF analyzer.  It takes into consideration the amount of gold you purchase (both in grams and troy ounces), the daily price of gold per gram, and measurement errors that can happen using less-than-accurate testing methods. You input the data, and the online calculator does the rest of the work.  You will find out the payback period in years and months.
  • Every Gram of Silver Counts. We are not advising you to buy or sell silver, but we will address how to help accurately identify if any silver or precious metal content is contained in the jewelry or precious metals that are cashed in or purchased.
  • 7 Questions about Gold Plating Answered. Learn about the difficulties in gold plating and rose gold plating, the differences in plating among countries, what happens to the gold after it’s cashed in, and how to distinguish between gold plating and solid gold, as well as determine the presence and concentration of other trace alloying elements and dangerous heavy elements (like lead) which could impact valuation and future refining needs.

• Webinar:
  • Not All that Glitters is Gold. Learn how to improve the bottom line of your precious metal business by doing the correct chemical analysis.