• Etterra@discuss.online
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    1 day ago

    Artificially expensive shiny rocks less valuable than advertised.

    Fun fact, reputable pawn shops don’t pay for gemstones because they’re effectively worthless. They only pay for previous metals. If you sell a wedding ring they’ll only pay you what the metals are worth.

    • fine_sandy_bottom
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      1 day ago

      Not really. They will pay you as little as they can get away with. Often that’s the value of the metals.

      • Etterra@discuss.online
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        17 hours ago

        That’s basically what I said. But the diamond especially and other gemstone cartels (who set the prices) won’t buy from the aftermarket. Which means you can basically only sell them to 3rd parties, such as pawn shops. They then have to convince people that they should buy second hand instead of custom or “official” merch, which I imagine is a tall order.

        So without a precious metal value as a starting point, they usually won’t bother. They won’t usually buy a tungsten ring, for example, even with gemstones that cost the buyer hundreds of bucks, because it has no resale value to them. Worst comes to worst, they can always offload precious metals somewhere. The gemstones just give them an excuse to artificially inflate the resale price.

        Of course as private businesses there’s always exceptions, and maybe I’m wrong and on a nationwide scale it’s different. But I doubt it.