In Downtown Ardmore, A Golden Corner

You’ve seen the full-page ads in newspapers, the billboards, the neon signs.

“We Buy Gold!” “Cash4Gold!” “Best Prices For YOUR Gold!”

In the midst of a major recession, they can easily be mistaken for signs of the times. But for a couple of downtown Ardmore veterans in the precious metals game, the equation is simple.

People always need cash.

Boom or bust, prince or pauper, gold is gold and money is money.

“The news makes business spike,” said Robert Kirschner, owner of , at Lancaster and Anderson avenues. “When gold was at $1,800, and it was on every news station, that’s what spikes our business—people think that when gold goes up a hundred or $200, they’re going to get twice what they would have been getting before. They’re really not, because the price has only gone up about one-sixteenth or something.”

John Coyne, Kirschner’s aptly named partner, said the familiar ads (which are usually brash and bold), along with record prices that make the news, refreshes awareness in people and jogs memories of unused gold jewelry. “They think, ‘I’m not doing anything with it, so I’m gonna go cash it in.’ It’s in front of them.”

And that’s fine with Kirschner, he laughed. “That’s what makes our business, having people come in.”

“We don’t pretend to be jewelers. We deal in precious metals.”—Robert Kirschner

Gold prices hit an all-time high late last summer, twice briefly spiking at $1,900 an ounce. The price hovered around $1,800 for a couple of months, but it is still at historic high levels. The same is true for silver, platinum and other precious metals. And that means more and more people through the door, at every income level.

Word-of-mouth, hand-to-God

While they are there, customers can peruse a small but select amount of merchandise by the windows. There are precious metal plates and lamps and an odd sword, but also typewriters (a beauty of a Smith-Corona, with marble-green keys and the original instruction booklet, for $20), horns and guitars and other musical instruments. Jewelry is kept behind the counter.

“What we really get a lot of is word-of-mouth referrals,” Kirschner said.

That’s because in the gold business, customers being treated with respect and fairness is pretty much the whole ballgame, Coyne added. “I can’t tell you how many people tell us [that],” he said. “We really stand behind that.”

“We don’t pretend to be jewelers,” Kirschner said. “We deal in precious metals. If they have something that’s worth more as a piece, we’ll buy it ... because we flip everything.”

The partners are also antique estate liquidators, and Coyne says he is associated with people from “Antiques Roadshow” and does appraisals for an online auction house called iGavel (owned by Lark Mason, of the beloved PBS show). Coyne joined Kirschner about 18 months ago in Ardmore.

“John came in to expand our scope,” explained Kirschner.

“We pay 85 percent of what we get,” Coyne said of the process of the public selling precious metals at their shop. “We determined that’s fairest way. We don’t mislead the public, especially by saying that ‘We’ll pay the highest prices.’

“Sure, if someone brings in a Cartier or a Tiffany piece, they’re going to get a premium. [A lot] of the others guys just stand behind their scrap prices.”

For those who actually are jewelers, “everything that you buy, everything that you do, is dependent on the price of precious metals,” said John Iannacone, co-owner of  in Ardmore, when interviewed by Patch last April for .

Financial meltdown

The vast majority of jewelry that comes through Main Line Precious Metals is purchased to be scrapped. For gold, the first item to be determined is the number of karats, followed by weight. There is then some math involving those factors and the price on any given day. That goes for silver and diamonds, too.

“Probably 98 percent, without exaggeration, will actually be melted down,” said Kirschner, who has also had locations in Upper Darby, Germantown and Chestnut Hill. “The others, sometimes we’ll try to sell them as pieces, but if not we’ll end up scrapping them, too, depending on what it is.”

“Women wear their favorite jewelry everyday. The rest sits in a box forever.”—John Coyne

Everything is relative, Kirschner said a few weeks ago, pointing to gold’s price of $1,660 that day. “Back in 1981, when gold was trading at maybe $800, the value of the dollar was so much less,” he said. (Proving his point, gold was trading at $1,749 late in the day Tuesday.)

Coyne agreed, saying that when gold is low, “even though we’re buying it as scrap, it becomes re-sellable as jewelry.” In other words, the value of the jewelry sometimes eclipses the value of the precious metals and jewels that make up a piece—though that has not been the case in some time.

“When I started in the late 70s, gold was still the barometer of world stability,” Kirschner said. “Today they say gold is tied to the dollar, but it still doesn’t follow the true formula. People come in all the time and ask. ‘What’s going to happen to the metals? How are they going to move?’ I always tell them, ‘If I knew that...’”

Betting on silver

Industrial uses and the proliferation of electronics (think about a cell phone and an iPod in the hoodie pockets of every teenager at Lower Merion High School, for example) are also driving up prices on some of the other precious metals, Coyne said—especially silver, which is much cheaper than gold or platinum ($34 and change per ounce, as of late Tuesday).

Barriers to entry in the business are not high, from a financial or regulatory standpoint. All you need is a license from the county and a storefront, but Kirschner and Coyne likened getting into the business right now to entering the real estate market in this post-bubble environment: if you were not in the game before things went haywire, it would likely be a tough road to hoe.

“It’s hard for someone to just jump into this,” Coyne said. “Can someone do it? Yes—anyone with the right motivation and the money can make it work, but it’s not easy. It looks easy...”

All precious metals purchased from the public must be held for five days before being resold, Coyne said, meaning there is inherent risk (though relatively low) in that time frame. “We want to flip it,” he said. “It comes in and we want it sold. The antiques, sometimes we’re sitting on it for a few months.”

Going to the well

The Main Line is obviously a different market than being in the city, Kirschner said. In the inner city, customers are often hurting for immediate cash.

“I’m not saying we don’t see people who are hurting for money,” he said. “But out here, the clientele is a lot different. We see a lot of people who are just taking advantage of the prices of the metal.

“It’s something that’s been sitting around, and they’re not desperate for the money. But who knows when they’re going to have an opportunity to take advantage of how strong the market is again?”

He and Coyne know it doesn't take a Ph.D. in economics to discern that no matter what kind of financial straits the nation (or, these days, the world) is in—people always need money, no matter how well off they are, and no matter what the unemployment rate is.

Another absolute: women wear their favorite jewelry everyday, Coyne said. “The rest sits in a box forever. They received it as gifts. And since everybody needs money all the time, it’s a well that you can go to if it’s sitting around.”

The tried and true. It’s a formula for success in many traditional industries. And that’s why Coyne doesn’t turn up his nose at those gaudy full-page ads in the newspaper.

“It’s been my experience that that kind of thing actually works very well,” he said.