Wholesale Diamonds
When I was a kid my parents used to shop at Costco’s all the time. Costco’s was this huge warehouse of everything you could think of packaged in Paul Bunyan’s overweight second cousin sized containers. You’d stock up your shopping cart as if you were doing a last minute hording for the approaching Armageddon, and the trick was, if you bought food, to finish it all before everything went bad. It never worked unless you were mormon and had 7 wives and 48 kids to feed. Otherwise you ended up with a lot of compost. Costco’s was buying wholesale.
But what about wholesale diamonds? Is there a giant Costco’s for wholesale diamonds? They don’t exactly go bad as fast as food does, though they do spontaneously turn into graphite at a rate so slow that the universe will recontract by the time you notice it, so why would someone have to sell wholesale diamonds in the first place? The term “wholesale” in wholesale diamonds simply means who’s selling to whom.
Back in the day when there was no internet, not everybody could sit down in front a screen and talk to, well, anybody. So not everyone knew the people who controlled the wholesale diamond mines from some mine in Zimbabwe. So what happened in wholesale diamond land was thusly thus. Bob Wholesale Diamond Guy had a huge load of diamonds from Mt. Vulcanosuvius in Zimbabwe. These were way too many to use in jewelry for himself, even if Bob had theoretically been married and divorced 27 times and needed lots of diamond engagement rings, and he doesn’t know everybody and doesn’t want to invest in store infrastructure. So he’d make a call to Mr. Retailer and say something like, “Hey, you have a store, right? I have all these diamonds. Can you buy them off me wholesale?” Mr. Retailer would say sure, sell them at twice the price he got it from Bob Wholesale Diamond Guy, and buy body-heat activated deodorant off the profit margins.
Today, because of the internet, Bob Wholesale Diamond Guy can just announce that he has a whole bunch of wholesale diamonds from Mt. Vulcanosuvius in Zimbabwe and he’s selling them at such and such, whether bulk or singularly. This eliminates Mr. Retailer.
So theoretically, yes, there are wholesale diamonds. But the only way to figure out if you’re really getting wholesale diamondprices is if you compare what you see on the net to what you see at your local jewelers who doesn’t own Mt. Vulcanosuvius and only buys wholesale diamonds off of Bob Wholesale Diamond Guy. If they prices are the same, you win. If they’re not, you’re being played.
