.. People crowding around a gold products counter jockey for position to pick up something in a gold store which sold its products at a price of 299 yuan per gram in a promotion – about 50 to 70 yuan lower than the normal price level...
Its unlikely that the store is selling BULLION at 20% off, unless there's a catch. Maybe from marked-up levels.
I DO recall the days when in the local mall's jewelry store, a "sale" of 20% off gold jewelry, customers used to similarly flood the store to buy the still over-priced trinkets.
Stores would hike mark-ups hundreds of percent, never expecting to sell except on the "sale days" when they would lower the markup slightly to still obscene levels. The herd then bought because, well, they are a herd, but also because they had more disposable income then and gold was bling. Now, with overindebtedness, layoffs, furloughs, inflation, small business failures, increasing taxes, home value collapse, many in the West (Europe, the US and South America) no longer have the wealth to spend on wealth preservation like The East does with their more frugal lifestyles and their nature of self-reliance..
Pole: are Walmartians buying, or selling bling?
How do you see that ever changing with all the social safety nets in place? They will never buy PMs as long as the govt gives them food , shelter, and booze, and they can use their declining allowances to buy entertainment.
No, the frantic buying of PMs, if it is allowed, will come from the small number of outliers with wealth they are gambling to preserve. And even then, all it'd take to squash it like a bug would be 90% taxes on sale, and restrictions with criminal penalties on transport / mailing.
