Complaint Review: The Goldsmith - Chicago Illinois

I’m writing this report in the event that someone would have the sense to research a jeweler before shopping there. We did not and we paid the price for it.

My husband and I walked in to the Goldsmith and happened to meet with Sherry Bender, the owner of the store. We looked at a few things and he decided to go back in and order the bands made for me as a surprise.

He ordered a diamond ring, the exact model that we had seen in the case with Sherry, to be made new for us in my size. Additionally he ordered two new sapphire bands, all to be in size 5 1/12. I was pregnant and the rings came in and didn't fit and I didn't like them. Sherry said she couldn't take them back. Ok, I figured this was our problem. I asked her if she would take the diamond ring back because it was a ring style she stocked anyway and she said she would have to totally remake the ring to be a size that would fit most customers, which would be a 6 or 7 she said. She said that she wouldn’t be able to sell the ring as new if it was simply resized, so I would have to pay her to remake the ring in order for her to agree to take it back. That seemed unfortunate, and we did talk to another jeweler who said that 5.5 is not such an uncommonly small size, but we decided to do it and paid her about $1500 to remake the ring in order to return some of the money.

Since she did not stock the sapphire bands I asked her to take them in on consignment. She said ok, but we would have to pay her 10% of the 6K in the event that they sold. She made it clear that they would most likely not sell because she said that people do not want yellow gold sapphire rings and the size would be too small still for most people. I asked her if she could just melt them down and return the cost of materials, but she said that would be negligible as she said most of the cost was in the craftsmanship. They are a fairly simple band style but apparently we paid a high price for craftsmanship.  I realize that there is not a good resale market for jewelry but it is pretty disheartening when the person who sold you an item tells you they essentially hold no value immediately following purchase.

I then asked Sherry to give me a description of the sapphire bands that I would be able to use in order to try to sell the rings on Ebay. She came back with a very brief description and a very vague ring size. She said the rings were “between a 5 ½ and a 5 ¾”. We asked her to be more clear because that is not something that we can use to sell the rings. We sent her a copy of our receipt where she had clearly written “5 ½” and asked her to please send us the inside diameter of the rings. Her response was 16.5mm, which by every resource we could find then indicated that the rings were a size 6. I questioned her on this and she sent back photos of the rings on a mandrel, where it showed that one ring was smaller than a 5.5 and one was bigger than a 5.5. At this point we didn’t trust anything that she said. We would discuss what had happened with pretty much any other retailer or friend we know or met because we couldn’t believe what she was doing, and were told consistently by other jewelers that she should just recognize the mistake and take the bands back.

In the process of emailing with Sherry it also came up that while she had sold us what she had said was a new diamond band, and drawn a picture of how it would look like her stock ring on our receipt, she actually just sold us her stock ring and had resized it.  This was unbelievable to us because all along she had said that she could not simply resize the ring she had sold us back to a bigger, more popular size, because it would make the ring less stable and therefore she could not rightfully sell it as “new.” She was however able to sell us a ring as “new” that was a resized stock ring but could not take the ring back. She said it was because there would then be 3 solder points that would make the ring unstable. If we had not gone through this process we never would have known that she did not sell us a new ring that she had promised at all, and if we had ever had it sized again it would have been exactly this- an unstable poor quality ring. Somehow Sherry is able to rationalize that this is ok for us, but that she could never do this to anyone else. We are pretty sure she would do this to anyone anytime if it serves her purpose.

We have since met and bought things from several other reputable jewelers and couldn't help but run this experience we had with Sherry past them to see what they thought. They all said that wasn't right, she never should have sold it as a new ring and definitely should have just taken it back. They sort of scoffed at the things that she had said to us as if that was typical of someone just trying to keep your money. Maybe she’s having a tough time making rent these days I don’t know, but it made me really upset because it seemed like we had been taken advantage of and were just now really piecing it together.

She has told me that she readily takes returns on stock items. However we learned about her store from my father in law who recently also had a bad experience with her when he went in and bought a pair of stock earrings that she said he could return and his wife didn't end up liking. When he tried to return them she gave him a tough time about it trying instead to give him store credit. This isn't exactly "readily taking back returns on stock items." No one is sure what has happened to Sherry over the years but she is making terrible karma for herself.

Since shopping with Sherry we have found other jewelers who I really can't say enough good things about. They were so transparent and specific with what they were making, and obviously took a lot of pride in their reputations and repeat business. I know we made the mistake by shopping at the goldsmith but the whole thing was such a bad experience and left me feeling so uneasy that I felt I needed to share this story with others. Just because a store is in a good location doesn't mean you really know what you are getting, and I would be wary of believing much that Sherry says.

At this point I have so little trust in anything Sherry says that if I do have to go in and pick up the sapphire rings I will have to take them to another jeweler to have them checked out before doing anything with them so that I know what we actually have.

Don't make the same mistakes we made. Don't pay anything to her up front, don't take anything from her without inspecting it for size and under a microscope in the store. Your best bet would be to find a different jeweler.