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QuickTake:
Every morning, cars line up outside a Eugene precious metal exchange as gold’s unparalleled climb turns old keepsakes into life-changing windfalls.
Every morning for the last six months, the low purr of idling engines stirs a quiet stretch of Willamette Street awake. A handful of cars line the curb, their drivers watching the door of a small shop with zip-close bags, envelopes and jewelry boxes in their laps.
Their wait ends at 9:30 sharp, when Matt Wallace opens Eugene Coin & Jewelry. What follows looks like any other morning rush — except this one runs on gold.
Once a “safe haven” against inflation, gold’s value has surged more than 50% since January, now topping $4,000 an ounce. The spike signals global unease, but for Wallace and other precious metal dealers across the country, it’s meant booming business.
“There will be, for the last six months, two to three people minimum in the store, up to 10 to 12,” he said. “Sometimes we have all the seats full, people standing, and six people helping. We will do 100, 200 transactions a day.”
Wallace said the flurry reflects a blend of economic jitters and policy shifts, from President Donald Trump’s tariffs and ongoing conflicts overseas to slowdowns in Europe and China and uncertainty over U.S. interest rates. Some investors, shaken by the volatility of cryptocurrencies, are parking their money in gold instead, he said.
The momentum traces back to bets that as the federal government borrows and prints more, the dollar’s worth falls and the allure of safe assets grows.
That mix has pushed the precious metals market into “uncharted territory,” Wallace said. Eugene Coin & Jewelry has long drawn customers from across Oregon, but its clientele has broadened from the usual sellers — people liquidating family gold after death, divorce or downsizing — to newcomers eager to cash in.
He said he wouldn’t be surprised if gold hit $5,000 an ounce before 2026. Its all-time high was on Monday, at $4,328 per ounce. The all-time low was about $34 an ounce in 1971, after the United States ended the gold standard.
Some experts are already forecasting future gold prices between $6,000 and $7,000, though Wallace was quick to note that employees at the store don’t give out investment advice.
“When you add in the volatility element, you bring out all kinds of investors who think one way or the other,” Wallace said. “We’ll have half of them that are selling and half of them that are buying. Somebody’s going to be right, and none of us know which it is.”
Wallace took over the business in January, after its longtime owner retired. Founded in 1980, the shop has long been a fixture, its glass cases gleaming with coins and jewelry. Notepads and scales rest on the counters, the whir of cash counters humming in the background.
Wallace starts every morning at 5:30 checking the markets. By week’s end, it’s not unusual for the store to have made several six-figure sales.
He emphasized that Eugene Coin & Jewelry doesn’t play the “game,” meaning employees are taught to be fair, not to get the best deal from customers. The store works on thin margins — displayed on an electronic board that lists live gold rates and the store’s payout — which is why the store runs on volume, he said.
Melting down gold
About 99% of the gold that comes through the door gets melted down, save for a few extremely high-quality pieces that are resold in-store. Everything else is cataloged and held for 10 days while staff upload it to a police database to ensure nothing was stolen. The shop then ships its weekly haul to a network of 15 to 20 “trade desks” across the country.
“You can just bring in boxes, and we will sort it by ‘Here’s the costume jewelry that doesn’t have value, here’s this gold, here’s your different carats, here’s your diamonds, here’s your coins, here’s your bullion,’” Wallace said. “At the end of it, you can leave with a large check.”
These days, he said, customers tend to leave his shop smiling. He rattled off stories of windfalls: a family whose inherited coin collection turned out to be worth $800,000; a woman who used a 72-pound silver bar valued at $50,000 to pay for medical recovery after a car accident; longtime locals who cashed out their gold investments and donated the proceeds to charity.
Mindy Schlossberg, a 56-year-old in south Eugene, was one of them. Sixteen years ago, burglars stole much of the gold jewelry she’d inherited from her late mother and mother-in-law. She kept the remaining pieces, the ones she thought were less valuable, locked away in a home safe, too afraid to risk losing them again.
This summer, she decided to finally let them go. She took a baggie of jewelry to Wallace’s shop, where an employee carefully sorted and tested each piece.
The process is meticulous. First, staff look for purity markings on the jewelry itself. Then they use XRF guns — $20,000 machines that fire a mild X-ray beam into the metal — to determine its exact content. Each piece is weighed and valued based on that day’s rate. Should the customer agree to sell, they provide their ID before receiving payment by cash or check.
Schlossberg assumed her pile, more than 250 grams of gold, might be worth $2,000.
“He shows me the piece of paper, and it’s $20,411,” she said. “I just thought, ‘Oh my gosh, I’ve been on ‘Antiques Roadshow,’ or I have the winning lottery ticket.’ I could not believe that it was worth that much money.”
She hasn’t decided what to do with her newfound fortune, though her family is considering using it to trade in their car.
“This burden became this amazing gift,” she said.
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