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July 24, 2005
All that glitters
One is advised to hold tight to his wallet whenever he finds himself buying something that is bought mainly by men for the women of their affection. Examples: chocolate, flowers, romantic dinners, and diamonds. Also beware when purchasing services that appeal to horny men. Match.com, a unit of IAC/Interactive Corp, reportedly has sales per employee of over $1M. In other words, the site is a money machine.
Flowers are another easy way to part a person from his money. Having scoured nearly every flower delivery site on the web, I'm convinced that they're all rip-offs. (Women, this does not mean that I won't occasionally be ripped-off for your pleasure.) A nice potted vase shown at $30 will likely cost $60 before it is delivered, the other $30 being hidden costs that aren't revealed until the end. Add a $10 "transmission fee," plus $10 "delivery fee," plus $10 for the vase itself. Flower delivery suddenly becomes a very profitable business.
The biggest money-maker is the diamond industry. Diamonds have no inherent value except in some industrial cutting applications. The worth of a diamond derives from DeBeers' successfully restricting their supply on the world market and the willingness of some other sucker to pay an inflated price for the carbon. The latter is a bit like tech stocks in the '90s: Yahoo is worth $300/share to me because tomorrow someone else will pay $301.
Now Dateline runs a story discussing diamond appraisals, a wildly successful marketing ploy designed to further inflate the value of carbon.
“I think it’s probably one of the more shameful things in our industry — appraisals used as marketing tools,” says Don Palmieri, a senior member of the American Society of Appraisers. “You get a high appraisal, you walk out thinking you just got the last great deal. But you just got misinformed with that document.”... [Palmieri] said in most cases the appraisals were grossly inflated. “Those prices came from the market imagination, I believe, of the retailer and the laboratory,” he says.
Dateline bought diamonds from various stores, took them out of their mount, and sent them back to the labs for appraisal. When they arrived back, almost none carried the same grading as the original appraisal.
Some of the grades varied significantly from lab to lab — and in fact, except in one case, none of the diamonds was graded the same by [Dateline's independent appraisers] and the labs.
Are rubies, emeralds, and sapphires this bad?
Posted by adrianjo at July 24, 2005 09:06 PM
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