My trip to the mall

[Imdanny]

I don't like going to malls but when my MIL was visiting the mall was somewhere we had to go and so I did it.

This mall is not like the mall in Honolulu where they have a Harry Winston. It's not even like other malls we have with Tiffany & Co. It's just a mall.

I got a chance to look at the jewelry stores while SO was doing other things.

I guess the highlight for me was going to the Zales store.

I asked the sales lady to show me a 1 ct RB. She helpfully suggested the 1 ct part. It sounded good to me.

The setting seemed flimsy to me. The diamond, however, at least in their store lights, had little sparkles of actual color. It was worth looking at it just to see it. It was $2999 and I didn't bother to ask about specs.

I passed some other rings in the cases with more elaborate settings and I didn't like those settings any better.

Other than that, I saw a lot of colored stone bracelets, rings, and earrings in stores' windows, with price tags.

There was an emerald cut citrine. I had no way of knowing anything about the treatment(s) used, but it reminded me how much I like emerald cut stones.

The prices on all of the colored stone jewelry I saw seemed outrageous to me. There were bracelets with what I can only guess were colored stones that had treatments to the nth degree, for instance, that were around $5,000. I was shocked.

I looked at some pearl necklaces in the window of one store with prices that were truly crazy. One pearl necklace had a price tag of $8,000 and I could tell just by looking at it that it was not South Sea pearls. It was a freshwater cultured pearl necklace, with size and color mismatching. I guess if they say, "It's pearls" people with pay that, but it wasn't anything to look at and the price was beyond ridiculous.

I wish more people could/ would use the internet to do research before buying jewelry. I can only assume the quality I saw at the prices they were are things people are buying. I don't know if any of these stores negotiate, but even if they do, the prices on the tags suggested to me a lot of people are getting inferior quality at inflated prices.

Sigh.

 

[centralsquare]

Oh - sounds horrid!

 

[JewelFreak]

Isn't it amazing the number of people who willingly put themselves up to be taken? I suppose the buyers of those pieces are people for whom spending $8000 is like spending $100 is to me, and there's nothing wrong with that. Just a shame to see them pay a high price for rubbish, but it's a choice they make. The consolation, I guess, is that for the rest of their lives they'll be thrilled with their jewelry because it was expensive -- therefore it must be valuable. I'm just grateful to be able to avoid that myself!

--- Laurie

 

[jewelerman]

yep, that high mall rent will make average jewelry very expensive and most people believe and are conditioned to believe that a store has their best interest at heart.Most guys have no clue how to shop in general let alone how to pick a jewelry store! for them its get off work,go to the mall and buy something that the sales lady guarantees will melt the wife/girlfriends heart on that special occasion.

 

[Imdanny]

Jewelerman, exactly right.

This is how I got started serious into jewelry as a hobby, after loving jewelry, natural history museums, and earth science since I was a kid.

I was living in this apartment building, and a bunch of women all of sudden, it seemed, came home with gold jewelry their boyfriends had bought them at the mall, rings and pendants, all in 14kt gold, from this exact mall, actually. These pieces were probably in the range of $100.

Ok, so then I thought, wait a minute, if their boyfriends are buying them jewelry from the mall, and particularly rings, why shouldn't mine buy me a ring?

And then, I, being me, came up with this idea, which of course I didn't share with them, that I'd get something very nice, something simple like what they got, but I'd research it, and get it from, frankly, somewhere they never would have thought of getting it from.

This is when I started looking at jewelry houses on the internet, found PS, etc.