I was able to pick up silver under spot price! Ok, so it was only 1 ounce so not that big a deal, but here is the story.
I stopped by a pawn shop near my house with the goal of seeing if they had any silver coins for sale. I played it off that I was there to browse, and after looking around a bit, I casually asked about their silver coins and bars they had under the glass.
The owners were husband and wife who had been in the same location for a long time, though it was my first time in there. In talking with them, they knew silver was just under $16 an ounce, so I didn’t think I would get any real deals, as I was in another pawn shop recently and they wanted $20.50 for one ounce silver American Eagles, all of which were pretty beat up – no way!
Well, this pawn shop had a couple of silver coins and the husband was looking online to see what they were going for. He was having trouble looking things up, seemed scattered brained, and then started rambling on and on about a $1,600 coin they had which he wanted to prove by showing me on their laptop. I was getting bored, as I simply wanted to know what they were asking for the silver coins. To change the topic, I asked how much for this beat up silver bar they in the display case. The husband asked his wife to “run the numbers”, and she went to the back to do something (check the weight? Or how much they paid for it?). The next thing I know, she comes back and says $13.50.
$13.50? For a 1 once APMEX silver bar? Umm, yes please!! I thought for sure the husband was going to say, wait a minute, but I said I would take it right away. I forgot that they were going to charge me sales tax (which is 9.75% here in Los Angeles county) so the total came out to $14.82, still less than an ounce of pure silver bullion at spot price!
The 1 ounce AMPEX silver bar had some toning, so I decided to clean it using the hot salt water in baking soda on tin foil trick (search that on youtube if you aren’t familiar). That cleaned the bar really well in 30 seconds, and it looks pretty good now! The steemsilvergold community knows this already, but for my other followers I would make the disclaimer that you should never clean your silver coins that have any real value beyond spot price, as that could ruin the premium value/collectability of the coin. In this case, the silver is bullion only so I cleaned it up because I like shiny things. Ha!
Here is the silver bar after cleaning:
Here is what it looked like when I purchased the silver bar:
Picture of cleaning setup:
There are many pawn shops in my surrounding area, so I think I will have to stop by and visit more of them to see if there are any other deals out there. If I had to guess what happened in this case, I would say they made a loan out using this silver bar as part of the collateral, and when they loan was not repaid, they sold the collateral at their predetermined markup rate (maybe +150% of what they acquired it for?), and didn’t bother checking to see what the going rate was, as they met their desired markup price. That is just speculation… they also could have simply made a mistake! I will take it though!
Thanks for reading,
Brian