go where you know
You know how when your car needs work, you always try to find a mechanic that you know and trust? Mechanics are renowned for they ability to rip people off, especially the common man. My car's not broken or anything. In fact I was shopping for jewelry yesterday and the experiences I had was the inspiration for this.
As you know, I had bought a diamond ring for Jackie a while back, and when I was shopping for that, I had absolutely no idea where the best place in this city, or this country for that matter, was to buy jewelry. I could always just go to a department store, but I wasn't too keen on paying the department store markups. The closest person I knew was Jackie and I couldn't very well ask her where the best place to buy jewelry was.
So I called another Korean friend, but unfortunately she had no idea either. Online shops didn't really please me either, as the diamond solitaire style ring is not popular here. They tend to like very flashy and, IMO, tacky, jewelry.
I phoned my aunt (actually my mother's cousin's wife) and she said she'd look into it. Sure enough, she said she knew someone from her church whose younger brother owns a shop. She said he does some wholesale, so I could get a good deal.
It was my only lead so I agreed and met my aunt one day and went to the shop. I was a little shocked at the decrepitness of the shop. It was in a little mall somewhere with a really old display case and some cheap-looking rings and watches.
Ah, I'm rambling. As you know, the diamond and the ring turned out wonderfully and both Jackie and I were very happy.
As far as gold goes, it's pretty inexpensive when you're getting something simple. We feel kinda silly getting wedding rings for a hundred bucks. So we decided on platinum.
Last weekend we went to Seoul to the jewelry district. Not much interesting there. My theory is that Korea is still not a rich country, so the market in platinum, which is about double the price of gold, is not really big. Almost everywhere we went there was no platinum jewelry on display or in stock. All of it was made to order.
We found one nice place with a nice design, a Tifanny knock-off, that would do both of our rings for nearly a million won.
We thought about going to that shop to get the rings, but decided the overhead of going to Seoul again would be something we could save. So we went shopping in Daejeon.
Suffice to say, there are less shops here and are for sure slightly more expensive than the jewelry destrict in Seoul (the biggest in the country). We showed them the design we wanted. Each store quoted us about 6 돈 (don; a don is a measurement they use here, equal to 3.7565 grams) for both rings, and about ₩100,000 for a 0.1 carat diamond for Jackie's ring. They also quoted us ₩150,000/don for the platinum, plus a few more green ones for the labour charge. All in all they came out to over ₩800,000, or about CA$1000. A little much.
We were about to screw it all and just go to the shop in Seoul which seemed to be a bit more reliable and also had a good design already (rather than having some jewelry worker copy a printout of a photo from a website), when it occurred to me to go back to the guy in the little shop who did the diamond ring.
He quoted us about 4 don for material, ₩30,000 less for the platinum at ₩120,000/don, ₩30,000 for a smaller diamond, and a minimal labour charge.
Suffice to say, his price was much more to our liking. We've slept on it and will probably order them.
The moral of the story: Go where you know!
