Fast Cash Gold Parties Featured On The Front Page
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Miami Herald Business Section
Suburbanites sell unwanted gold at home parties
Forget Tupperware and Mary Kay. Suburbanites are flocking to home parties to sell unwanted jewelry
Forget Tupperware and Mary Kay. Suburbanites are flocking to home parties to sell unwanted jewelry
TEQUESTA -- Teri Davis sipped red wine from a glass painted with colorful palm trees, chatted with friends and snacked from platters of food on a nearby counter.
But her attention kept turning to the kitchen table, to a group of partygoers waiting their turns to pull out bags, boxes or Ziploc baggies of old gifts or family antiques and see how much they could get from the gold buyer seated among them.
''I felt really weird about coming to a party like this at first,'' said Davis, who had come to her friend's house on a Wednesday evening for her first gold party. ``I circled the table like a vulture a couple times.''
But Davis' nervousness about selling her old, unwanted gold pieces was gone later in the evening as she proudly announced that she had just made $525.
''I'm shocked I got this much,'' she said. ``I was expecting maybe a couple hundred dollars. . . . I'm glad I came.''
Forget Tupperware or Mary Kay parties; a new type of home party -- where the goal is selling, not buying -- has become increasingly popular in suburban neighborhoods.
Among the factors fostering the growth of these parties: a weak economy and gold prices that have shot up to as much as $1,000 an ounce in recent months.
''The price of gold has risen so quickly,'' said Jim Steel, a commodities analyst with HSBC. ``There's always some gold recycling going on, but the trade price has to rise to a great degree to see a jump in recycling like this.''
Jupiter, Fla., pawnshop owner Paul Mikel said he began to see an influx of people about a year ago coming into his store wanting to sell jewelry and other gold pieces.
At about the same time, his wife, Stacey, who worked in the mortgage business, was struggling with the collapse of the housing market and the ensuing credit crunch.
So the couple decided in June to start a gold party business, FastCashGold Parties.com.
''We realized that some people have never really sold their jewelry before, and many don't feel comfortable going to a pawnshop or jewelry store,'' said Stacey Mikel, who ran the Tequesta gold party that Davis attended. ``Gold parties are a really good thing because they feel more comfortable in their home or their friend's home.''
The Jupiter-based company now has 20 employees locally, Stacey Mikel said, and a number of licensed secondhand dealers doing parties in other states such as Texas, Kansas, Colorado, Minnesota and Ohio.
''The people who did the gold party, they're very discreet,'' Davis said, adding that their demeanor and the fact that her friend, hostess Mary Ellen Morris, invited them into her home made Davis feel comfortable.
'It wasn't like other places that advertise that they buy your jewelry; there was no big red light going `woop, woop, woop.' ''
