For what it’s worth, here’s the negotiating strategy I used:
When I found the diamond I wanted, I asked how much it was. Then I picked out a setting, and asked about that.
I then said “What’s the best price you can give me for both of these?” The guy knocked a few hundred bucks off and quoted me a total figure. I had shopped long enough to know it was a pretty good deal. So I agreed.
Yes, I could have probably chiseled him for a little more, but IMHO, when you’re buying jewelry, it’s not worth the bother to really push.
By the way, I totally recommend shopping in those “jewelry exchange” type places. The people there carry lots of loose stones; it will be easier to look at the diamonds under natural light; and the prices are much better.
It’s also easier to negotiate, since the person you’re dealing with generally has the knowledge and authority to give you a low price and still know that he or she is making a fair profit.
The big TV jeweler here advertises, guarantees that every gem will appraise for twice the price. That’s how much appraisals are worth. There is no “real” market price, it’s all what you personally think of the piece. It’s like appraising designer dresses- the appraisal is useless at the very next salon where someone else is the favorite.
I agree that there are many intentionally inflated “appraisals” out there, but at the same time, I believe that the market for diamonds, especially round-cut diamonds, is liquid enough that if you showed the same diamond to several (honest) appraisors, you’d get roughly the same evaluation.
It’s kinda like buying a house - yes, there’s some subjectivity, but if you shop for a house long enough, you can make a pretty good guess about whether a house is overpriced, a good deal, a so-so deal, etc.
Not much room for bargaining if you are getting a CZ. They are dirt cheap, as are “created” stones. You could get a decent, nice-looking CZ, about one carat, for about $20-$30. Just because you buy a gold or platinim setting doesn’t leave much to bargaining over.
As lucwarm said, if you go in and pick out a diamond and then pick a setting, you may have a little wiggle room, especially if you pay cash. Picking out a ring already made and putting it on a credit card lessens the bargaining room.
Also, most appraisals are for insurance riders. They are notoriously inflated.
N9IWP mentioned getting a heart-shaped ruby. Please think twice about this. Heart-shaped stones do not show off the best clarity of the stone. The top indentation takes away from the beauty of the stone and lessens the “sparkle.”
if you can’t afford something “flashy” etc (if this is what you want), don’t buy a CZ, get something different.
what’s the point?
to show it off?
IT’S the marriage that counts, not the ring.
nevertheless, if you like the look of modern jewelry, get an artist made ring. Sometimes they are so unusual that they will draw more attention than a dime-a-dozen diamond.
I have seen some that are marbalizes with gold and silver and are simply stunning!
http://www.abrasha.com
is one example of really cool modern jewelry.
he does you tiny damonds, but they are of a high caliber and sparkle wonderfully!
and they are inexpenisive compared to a diamond ring.
Of course you can. Jewelry is high mark-up. You are in a better position to bargain if you know a lot about what you are going to buy. If you are buying a gemstone, compare it to other gemstones. The one you want will smile at you. Look for a shop that says how long they have been around, the longer the better. Go into lots of stores and look at lots of stones.
If you are getting a diamond, round cuts (pretty standard) don’t chip as easily as some of the fancier cuts and are more available and cheaper than the fancy cuts. They also have rating systems, the four C’s: carat weight, cut, clarity and color. Other things being equal, you want to emphasize cut as that will give the best sparkle. Compare it to others, etc. Make sure that the gem will appraise for at least the price you buy it. A platinum setting will last longer than gold as the prongs don’t bend as easily. It is more expensive.
Also remember that diamonds are sold as precious stones, but are really semi-precious: they are not as rare as people in the business would like you to believe. You will never be able to sell it for anywhere near what you bought it at, so it is a poor financial investment.
mY ADVICE is to just go to antique places and shows and get jewelry there. You can often get it for just the weight of the gold, and unless the dealer happens to know or care the stone is free. You can get very nice rings this way. Almost nobody, whether in a jewelry store or antique show knows that jewels are made out of chemicals, and they can’t tell you what the jewel is. Diamonds are carbon in tetrahedral crystals. Rubies and sapphires are both cut from hexagonal crystals that formed in nature when aluminum and oxygen got together under particular conditions and crystallized. Rubies and sapphires are aluminum oxide crystals. There is a small amount of other elements that accounts for the different colored sapphires and for rubies, but they are all aluminum oxide aka corundum. They are very easily and cheaply made in factories. There is the verneuil process and other processes. In the verneuil method it goes something like this: powdered aluminum falls down into a flame and combines with oxygen to form the large crystal out of which the ruby or sapphire is cut. They cut them sloppy, mostly, but sometimes you can get ahold of a beautiful sharp cut ruby or sapphire with even symmetrical back facets, yet. When a stone is made by man instead of by nature they used to call it synthetic. Now they use the term man-made because people are so stupid about minerals that the dealers and jewellers were using the term synthetic for anything not found in a cave that was manmade. So they tell you oh this is synthetic and you say is it made of glass and often it turns out it is just glass, which isn’t synthetic ruby but glass colored to look like a ruby. So now they use the term manmade when they are talking about a ruby made in the ruby factory, etc. Such a ruby has all the same properties,including hardness 9, and crystal structure
as a ruby formed in the rocks of nature, except it is less flawed. I prefer them by far. They can also manmake emeralds, but by a secret process and they aren’t much better than naturally occurring emeralds, both being full of crud inside and who knows what outside. Emeralds are coated, pressurized to fill fissures, and so on, as are other jewels. The average schmuck buying a diamond or other ring has no idea what has been done to the stone, and some of it is legal provided the dealer tells you, but they usually don’t know. Most of those blue topazes have been heat treated and/or radiated to get the shade of blue that is popular. Most all topaz comes opaque or clear and the clear is then heated and radiated. All this is taken for granted and is legal. Aquamarines come in a much nicer color than they cook into them, which is just an ordinary blue color. You can’t get a nice natural sea green aquamarine, because the populace just wants blue stones.
The public should stay away from emeralds especially and turquoise is notoriously treated; both stones are a mess by the time they get through with them. Diamonds are also cooked, coated, colored, dyed, and so forth. Of course I love stones and have to have them but I don’t go over a certain amount since there is no way of telling what you are getting. Nobody will test a stone for you for nothing. They claim they have this equipment and it can test stones, and there is an easy diamond tester but the other stones have to be tested in refractometers and by floating them in various exotic fluids not generally available. When you have to have a stone, just make up your mind there are no real guarantees. I have found more ignorance of simple basics among jewellers than anybody else. Now can somebody tell me why there are so many people working in so many jewelry stores? Every mall in every city has tons of gold in it and diamonds. If these are supposed to be so rare, where are they coming from is my second question. And why is jewelry store jewelry so ugly, especially men’s rings?
DO YOUR RESEARCH!! Knowledge it THE most powerful negiotiating tool. If you are taking that stroll down the aisle and as you said the diamond is not important to you why bother at all?? No really I am being serious here.
If he asks (or you for that matter) and you get a YES response you are engaged. You don’t need an engagement ring if you both know it in your heart. If money is an issue, spend the money that you would otherwise spend on the engagement ring and buy a couple of really nice wedding bands.
My wife and I picked out a matching pair in a jewlery store that were tagged @ $1100. We asked if there was anything that could be done about the price. The sales lady (who was great BTW ) She basically came back with $800 taxes included.
Wether or not you can bargain with the store depends largely on the store. What I found when searching for “THE Ring” was that the larger ‘chain’ stores were less willing to bargain as they rely on volume not mark up while the smaller independents were more willing to deal a little. As I said at the beginning of this ramble do your research. Figgure out what it is that you want and get prices for that or like rings.
Remeber you can always get the diamond for an anniversary present.
Don’t get to hooked up on the rings they are only metal and rocks after all
If your City has a Jewelry district, I’d get it there and bargain hard. If your only options are the mall and the place in the home depot/staples shopping center, i’d still bargain, but don’t expect a big discount. Diamond rings are notoriously overpriced items.
Consider using the money for a down payment on a house.
Bring cash. Offer to pay the amount of cash you’re willing to let go of, don’t try to figure out what the piece of jewelry is worth or what they’ll let go of it for, just determine how much you are willing to pay and make an offer.
Just the opposite for me… (And we just passed our 20th anniversary.)
IMHO the ring and the diamond was not important, it was the story. So we bought our rings at Tiffany’s and paid retail - but like anything else “prestigious” in society nowadays, it’s the brand name that matters when you show it off, not the actual product. We bought a simple engagement ring at Tiffany’s in Toronto. (Fun fact, even though it was nowhere hear high end, the sales lady was gracious, let my wife try on a $90,000 3-carat before showing us stuff in our price range; and amazingly, we went in there several years later and she still recognized us.)
Our wedding rings, plain platinum bands, we bought in NYC on 5th Avenue. Coming back from the trip, customs lady asked what we had to declare. I told her wedding rings, $1800. She asked if we bought anything else? Yes, a few shirts. So instead of paying additional 15% luxury duty on $1800, we paid duty on $1800 worth of clothing, minus our personal exemptions.
But - Tiffany has excellent brochures on what to look for in a diamond. And, being able to say “these rings are from Tiffany’s” probably means more than size. A large prestige firm is unlikely to be playing tricks like substituting inferior versions or modifying gems. Plus, as many websites will tell you, cut angle is most important for sparkle and some jewelers will sacrifice size for a better cut. When the sun hits my wife’s ring, it’s like a disco ball.
(Many jewelry stores use those halogen spotlights to emphasize the sparkle of the gems.)
But, I got the impression - no, they don’t bargain. Tiffany’s is big enough they don’t need to haggle over a sale under $10,000 or even $100,000. People come to them.
It’s true that for many years De Beers thoroughly controlled (but not quite owned - it was a De Beers-controlled distribution mechanism) the diamond market. Alas, no more. That control has waned over the last few decades. There are now sizable producers that don’t participate in the De Beers-led cartel. These new producers include both mines and synthetic diamond labs. Here is a story about these more recent developments.
The thing about markups is true. The jewellery, especially diamond, business is notorious for its enormous mark-ups and its information asymmetries - it’s almost a textbook example of an imperfect market from an economist’s perspective. This was covered by a classic article which, despite its age, is still worth a read, and much of it still applies.
But… huge swaths of the consumer economy (and massive profits) have been built on the importance we attach to brand names. I don’t subscribe to that, but we were willing to play the game to impress others with this particular purchase.
And oddly enough, we found that compared to for example Birk’s, Canada’s best known jeweler, we found Tiffany’s about the same price or cheaper and the rings much more elegant. Whereas Peoples, the big Canadian jewelry chain, would happily sell you a 1-carat SI2 diamond (for about half what we paid for 0.36ct VVS1 and platinum setting) on the theory that many will go for quantity over quality.
In the end it’s your choice. I hope a wedding ring is not planned as an investment, since the question is - under what circumstances would you be planning to cash it out? It’s to impress others, to flaunt status. I don’t wear Armani suits or Bruno Magli shoes, but for the wedding ring - why not?
But to summarize points for the OP (far too late) the bigger sales volume the store does, the higher end the store, the less likely they need your business enough to haggle over a few hundred dollars. (And the more likely then that the sales clerk is too low on the totem pole to have authority to adjust prices)