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 There's near panic going on among smaller shops and even regional dealers who have always relied on the big national refiners as an outlet where to go with this stuff. >> So Harry, would you say the refiners basically shutting down is going to be a death blow to a lot of coin shops across the country? >> Welcome to Gold Silver News, your go to destination for all things economics and finance. Whether you're an experienced investor, an inquisitive student, or just someone who wants to stay ahead in

today's everchanging economic landscape, you've come to the right place. Now, we'll show you the best scenes of the latest interview. But first, smash the subscribe button, hit the like button, and send us super thanks if you find our daily recaps valuable. Enjoy the episode. >> The showcase is looking a little bit light today, Adrian. Are people buying up silver? >> Yeah, people are buying and people are selling. So, it's a crazy market. Over $100 silver. >> Yeah, this is the first time I've been

in your shop with silver over hundred. And I do have to point out your guys's pricing has changed. It used to just say a dollar amount. Now we're at spot plus. Can you explain why the change? >> Yeah, it's just the market's been very volatile. I don't know if you've been following silver, but uh I mean we've had some pretty wild price swings. I mean $15 up and down, $17 at one point, and it's just it's it's wild. And so in order to keep up with the pricing, uh,

we had to go to a plus system. >> Harry, is this the first time you guys have ever done a new pricing system like that? >> That's actually the original pricing system. I was spot plus this or that, um, in the early years, but it became just easier for everyone. Not everyone even knows what spot means. And there was a lot lot of arithmetic involved for every transaction. So for some years until yesterday we were at a unit pricing every day on various uh silver bullion pieces. It was so volatile

yesterday I had to keep changing it and finally I just said let's just go to a spot plus uh system. I guess I won't have to change the sign today because those premiums I don't think are going to change and so we'll stay with the spot plus pricing at least through today. >> Well let's take a look at the board. We do have silver at $18 an ounce and gold is near 5100. So, the metals are still doing very well. >> The metals are doing well and there's a lot of demand for it even at these

prices. But there's there's issues with how much shops are able to buy, if anything, and where to go with it once they do buy it. So, it's a it's an ongoing challenge that we're having to experience and we are working our way through it thanks to, you know, the wisdom that Adrian brings to the party here. I think that's something that we might want to chat about today is what's going on in the overall market, what dealers are having to do with the scrap gold and silver they buy, even bullion

pieces. Well, Harry, I'll just ask you straight up. I've seen a lot of coin shops in this area and around the US stop buying silver altogether. They're refusing to buy even a single ounce. And this is something I've never seen before. But are you guys here at the shop still buying silver? Today we are buying it. We have to be very uh cautious with what we buy and how much we buy and where we can go with it once we do buy it. But yesterday we didn't turn down anybody. >> Lucky and fortunate enough to have

sources of, you know, locations to go with this material. But what Harry is saying, it's probably yesterday. We don't have to turn anybody away and you know we embrace the people that have bought from us and we want to give people a destination to go with these things because it's a little bit of a strange feeling when you go give somebody your trade and then you go back and you know either the doors closed or just not buying. If I can share a couple stories from yesterday locally here at

one point yesterday afternoon a customer said well so and so across the street we literally have a rival just diagonal to us across the street. They're paying $3 more per ounce. I said, "Yeah, but they close their door at noon, so they can quote all the prices they want, but we're open and they're gone for the day. They're out of capital." Another bullion dealer, what I always thought as the biggest bullion dealer in the region, called me yesterday in a bit of a frenzy

as to, "Are you buying silver today? And are you able to sell your scrap sterling silver? And are you opening on time because we're opening a few hours late?" We got to sort out the situation. So there's near alarm going on among smaller shops and even regional dealers who have always relied on the big national refiners as an exit were to go with this stuff. So now I think the mindset is shifting among the shops and that they'll buy what they need for the retail shop but no more than that. In

other words, if we need buffaloos, we'll buy buffaloos. But if you bring in one and 12 ounce Canadian polar bears, we're going to tell you we're not buying that because that's the kind of thing that might have on a regular basis, gone to a refiner who now isn't buying any silver. No, that makes perfect sense. So, can you kind of explain what's going on with the refiners? Just yesterday, I saw one of them is no longer buying any scrap gold, which I thought was really notable, but another one of the big

refiners has stopped buying silver altogether. Correct. That is correct. Gold was always sort of like, "Oh yeah, bring all the gold you want. That's not a problem. It's the silver that's the problem." And then Adrien sent me the duplicate of a letter he got yesterday about a very, very large refiner, a nationwide refiner. They're not buying silver. We already knew that. Now, on the gold, what they used to settle with us literally that day with a wire is now a 7 to 10 day dispersement. They won't

even secure the price for you. So, usually when you go to a refiner, you take the, you know, say, "Hey, here's my gold." They lock you in at the current spot price and you're paid out within a few hours. Now, what they're doing is, "Yeah, we'll take your gold, but here you said that time frame period." I mean, 7 to 10 business. What is it? I'm sorry. 7 to 10. It's 7 to 10 days, up to 2 weeks to get paid out. But now you're exposed to the changes in the market

because the price can change and you're not locked in until they get to your gold and they refine it. That's when you get paid out. So let me understand Adrian because I'm learning as we go on the fly here too. Like normally when we drop it off we get a print out that says you know this is the settlement the lot. So now they're not even doing that. No. Okay. It's like we're going to get to your lot. When we get to your lot, if gold is down, you know, 20% or whatever it might be, then that's where you're

going to get paid out. So, let me give you a hypothetical scenario. A coin shop understands this and they're not willing to take on the risk of the price fluctuations. They might just say, "All right, we're not going to buy a single ounce because they can't handle that type of risk." Yeah, definitely. And the thing is, when you're in a business like we are, I mean, cash flow is the most critical thing for the business. in most shops. I mean, you do one big gold purchase and you're stuck for, you know,

two weeks almost. I mean, it just can't happen. Let me address that even further because what's really vital here for everyone to understand is if you bring in your scrap, particularly gold, right now, and you get something far below what you expected in terms versus the spot price. Think about that, dealer. Okay. If we can't know what we can sell your scrap for in a reasonable amount of time, we've got to plan for the worst. In other words, gold's $15.96. But if we're not going to get even a

lock for 10 days, we have to assume that's going to be way under that. Could be higher, but it's rolling the dice. And most of us aren't in this for gambling. You know, we're business people, so we're going to have to buy it with an eye toward. It could go way down. It's not ideal the situation, but think about stuff rolling downhill. The smaller shops are dependent on these huge refiners to help fund their business on an ongoing basis. In other words, they're a customer, if you will.

We buy from you, the public. We take it to the refiner. They're paying us for your scrap. And now we don't even know for 10 days what they'll pay us. They will pay us, but we don't know how much. So, if we take the scrap aside and we just look at coins like bullion eagles, you know, whether it be a gold eagle or a silver eagle, that stuff you could theoretically resell to new customers. So, that might be a little less risky and you'd pay more for something like that. Sure. But think about this

scenario. We could use, you know, 5 to 10 ounces at any given day in the shop of gold. But say someone brings in 50 ounces or 120 ounces, all of which has happened here many times. Normally, I get in the car and I drive the excess to the refiner. Now, what do I do? Now, how do I buy it in a way that I don't get wiped out? I either buy it way back or I don't buy it at all. I know one local gold buyer, not a coin shop, but one of those we buy gold places. really nice fella. Goes every single day to the

local refiner because that keeps his lights on. He got to sell every single day. And I wonder if he's going to survive this because he can go drop it off every single day, but he's not going to be paid for a week, 10 days. For me, it's very important to be able to provide a service for people. I don't want to just close the doors and say, "Hey, we're just not buying." And I understand everybody's different. Every situation is different. So, I don't want to speak for everybody, but it's, you

know, as a stacker, I mean, think about yourself and, you know, you go see this dealer all the time. You buy, you know, they're happy to sell you their silver, but now you have an emergency or something and you want to make yourself liquid and we'll give you the option to be liquid and to do what you need to do. And if we can do it the time, we do it. I think to Adrienne's point too, one of the reasons to stay buying and selling, stay active in both ends of that transaction is that when times change,

and they always do, I think people are going to remember where they could go and how they were treated during the difficult times. Everybody can do well when times are easy, but right now I think people are going to remember when no one was buying, this coin shop was buying. So Harry, would you say the refiner's basically shutting down is going to be a fatal blow to a lot of coin shops across the country? If you've been under capitalized, you can't survive the 10 days. I don't know how

you survive, you know, going forward because I don't think this situation is going to be resolved anytime soon. This could be a whole 2026 scenario. So, some coin shops are going to have to turn into kind of their own little ecosystem where they can only buy what they're willing to take on and sell that day or the next day or what they can handle, you know, in terms of their retail sales over the counter. But if we do see demand continue to pick up, maybe the mania increases for silver, then it's

not going to be too much of a problem, right? If you got a line out the door waiting to buy, it depends. If there's a balance between buying and selling, you're right. Our showcase is still sort of empty because we had a nice balance yesterday. We were buying and selling and trading all day long on kind of an equal footing. But there are days when we've just done nothing but buy. And those are the difficult days to survive if you're under capitalized or if you haven't cultivated the relationships

Adrian has with guys who will still buy it. And they're few and far between. Well, speaking of the showcase, let's take one more look over here. We have not too many eagles. We got a few of the 10 bars. We got some rounds and you do have a little bit of gold up top. So, I would say all things considered, you guys are doing pretty well. We were open all day long. We didn't turn away any trades, both buying, selling, or trading. I suppose, you know, day-to-day we're surviving. Interesting times, you

know, no reason to despair, although sometimes I do admittedly, but just have a good attitude about it. Adrien talks about pivoting. We're going to pivot and make this thing work and keep the doors open and keep buying and selling. If I can add some depth to the concept of shop durability and like you were asking, is that a death blow? Refiners aren't buying. There are a lot of shops around the country that are basically bullion shops. And that's a legitimate business model. That's a business model

that's existed since ancient Babylon. There's nothing wrong with that. But we've built a more integrated, I would call it in air quotes, a fullervice coin shop. We have US type coins, foreign coins, ancient coins, paper money. We have a little something of everything. And we're more diversified than a lot of operations in that sense. That's a really good point because not only do we do silver, gold, bullion, we do the numismatic, we do watches, we do diamonds. It's a little bit more varied

and we have all these different things that we do. Like if I can recommend anything to a dealer, it's like, you know, don't be afraid to step out of the box and get out of your comfort zone and make your shop survive or to keep things rolling because if you don't pivot, if you don't put in that effort, nobody's going to do it. So, think outside the box and make it happen. I mean, we always tell customers to buy the book before the coin. Like, if you're going to collect a type series, get

specialized literature on that. But I think there's a lot of dealers that, for lack of a better word, and I know this is a bad word, but they've gotten complacent in the sense that it's easy money to buy bullion and just flip it to the refiner. It's harder money to educate yourself on historic type coins and world coins and things like that. But that's something you have to do if you want to call yourself a professional in this industry. Right now, as a dealer, don't be afraid to buy that coin

and then look for the buyer later. Just do whatever you need to do to make it happen. And just trust yourself. You can do it. Well, Harry, I've never been here before with silver over 100. It's nice to see the change and we'll see where it goes from here. Huh? Up, up, and away. Thanks so much for the time. If your priority right now is not chasing returns, but protecting what took decades to build, I've put together a private road map linked below. If your priority right now is not chasing

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