I head an ad on the radio this morning from Robbins Diamonds. This is a well-established jewelry store in the heart of downtown Philadelphia. In this ad, they encourage the listener to go sort through their jewelry box and get out all their unwanted gold and silver, and sell it to the store. They claim that the prices of gold and silver are "skyrocketing", so now's a great time to get rid of them. They even suggest that we sell them our unwanted silver flatware.

This is odd to me. Aren't jewelry stores supposed to want to SELL you jewelry, rather than buy it from you? I mean sure, I guess they buy it all the time, but not from normal people. I would expect them to get most of their stock from wholesalers. It's especially odd that they would be asking for used flatware, considering that it's not even jewelry. These radio ads aren't free, so they must have a good reason before they start buying ad time. There must be an explanation.

There is one. They must think that gold and silver are undervalued right now. Why else would they want to buy it? They must be expecting the price to go up in the near future. Now why on Earth would they think that?