Over just a few hundred meters, along a busy road in the city center, the boutiques Godot & fils, Or en cash, Comptoir national de l’or follow one another, and often a few others with names combining golden and pompous terms – “gold”, “or”, “national”, “royal”… The proliferation of gold buying and selling brands no longer goes unnoticed in metropolises and wealthy towns.
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The three main specialized networks alone (Or en cash, Godot & fils, Comptoir national de l’or) have some 300 pharmacies, many of which are franchised. And the inaugurations keep coming, all over France, sharpening competition on the amount of commissions charged. Rue Vivienne, in Paris, at the headquarters of the Godot & fils brand, whose interior woodwork highlights its reassuring age (1933), customers are queuing up this Tuesday in early September. “We are ultra-competitive, our commissions are around 1.5% thanks to our volume of transactions, praises Antoine Tahar, the agency manager. Elsewhere, they can rise to 2.5% or 3.5%. »
Placing a plastic bag on his desk, he continues: “Look! These are our purchases for the past hour. At least 1 kilo of gold jewelry. The quantities have been abnormally high since Covid-19 in 2020, but this has accelerated further recently. People take advantage of the price peak to sell. Gold leaves homes…” He goes in, too. Because the boom in activity of gold merchants can be explained as much by their sales of gold coins, bars and ingots. Partner at Godot & fils, Arnaud Fhal assures that he sells more yellow metal to individuals than he buys: “Thirty years of people making money investing in gold. Our customers love us! In 1994, it was worth 8,000 euros per kilo. It’s 73,000 euros now. We will undoubtedly arrive at over 100,000 euros…”
The ounce of gold also reached a new historic record of $2,704.89 on Friday, October 18, after the announcement of the death of Hamas leader Yahya Sinouar in Gaza. It has gained around 30% since the start of the year.
“We are in the concrete”
And Arnaud Fhal lists the countless virtues of this safe haven in times of uncertainty, crisis and armed conflict: “Gold is easily exchanged for cash, unlike real estate. We are in the concrete, not in cryptocurrency, we never talk about “hacking”. Customers want to be secure, they are afraid. Fear of inflation, debt, the collapse of the banks… When they take the ingot in their hands, when they feel its density, they are impressed. » Solid, reassuring, now accessible to more budgets since there are ingots of 5 grams, 2.5 grams, 1 gram, even (around 75 euros).
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