A friend of mine wants to buy a few emeralds during a recent trip to Colombia. We had an appointment with a friend of a relative that was supposed to be able to get us a good deal on a quality emerald.The day before the appointment we checked out the Gold Museum in Bogota. My friend checked out the emeralds in some of the jewerly stores in the neighborhood. Later we sat in the park.
A man in clothes that were old and looked like they were in need of good washing approached my friend and showed him some "emeralds". My friend wasn't interested so the man pulled out another pack of emeralds. I think he had a pack or two of emeralds stuffed in each pocket.
Still not interesting my friend he grabbed a pack that contained a huge emerald, not as big as this one in the gold museeum but much larger than any we saw in the jewerly stores. We surmised it was made of plastic.
The man wouldn't as much as acknowledge my prescence. He finally left and we say him enter a blog by building and trade packets of emeralds with an associate. He returned to bother my friend a little more.
The only think we could figure out is that he saw my friend in the jewerly store looking at emeralds and took him for a good mark.
The following day we met the emerald dealer and went up stairs to a small office that had some stone cutting equipment in it. The elevator operator locked the front door of the building when people went up the elevator. We spent hours looking at hundreds of emeralds from $50 to $5000 or more.
Most were arranged in sets of various sizes and shapes. The men who showed them to us weren't typical salesmen. They dressed casually and there wasn't a hit of pressure. They could have used a little better scale. I think maybe the batteries were almost run down.
It was certainly a case of information overload and too many choices. If we weren't too interested in a set, one of the men would disappear for a while and return with more.
Each stone was examined through a maganifying glass and weighed. The weights always corresponded to what was written on the packets. The prices were always given in Colombian pesos and at the very end converted to dollars for payment.
After my friend chose the emeralds he wanted, he made an offer in dollars and we went to lunch while the salesmen went to get approval for the transaction. After lunch we had to wait a long time for the building to open and went back upstairs.
The offer was accepted (I guess it was too high). Now my friend was worried about whether we got a good deal and whether the stones were good. I assured him it was a much better deal then doing business with the man in the park.
On one of the domestic flights my friend put a few items in my suitcase including his emeralds. Fortunately he took them out at the last minute as much suitcase ended up in never never land (or somewhere other than on our flight)!
After he returned to the USA all he fears of paying too much or getting a low quality stone quickly vanished as he found a local jeweler would pay 2-3 times what he did!
