I would like you to take a moment and sit back and picture a world where we did not yet know the…read morewords, "COVID-19" or "social distancing." This is the idyllic world we lived in, in late February 2020, when I strolled into my local small-town jeweler, Hunt Country Jewelers, and dropped off my diamond stud earrings to be reset in yellow gold. I dealt with Claire Cutshall and our interaction was pleasant and brief. She told me my earrings would be ready in about 2 weeks.
Fast forward about two weeks into early March: schools are shutting down, people are hoarding toilet paper, and fear is running rampant. It is then that I get a phone call from Claire letting me know that while in transit to New York City, my diamond studs were stolen out of a package. This, my friends, was the first time I had ever heard that my diamonds were leaving the small hometown shop known to us as Hunt Country Jewelers. If you read their very own website's homepage you see they pride themselves on all of their in-house work. I was so shocked to hear that my diamonds were lost but was pacified by the owner's reassurances that she would make this right and replace them with "better" stones. The original diamonds were roughly 1/3 carat each but Claire insisted they were only 1/4 carat each and that I was mistaken about their size because they had a bezel setting, making them appear larger. Luckily for me, I had an old appraisal stating that I was correct about their carat weight. I should have known at this point that this business was going to attempt to cut corners in dealing with my issue, but sadly I did not.
She did indeed replace my stones with ones that were reportedly slightly "better" and had them available for us to pick up. They looked fine enough, although certainly not very different than the ones I had dropped off, but Claire told me they were better so I trusted that. At this point, we were embroiled in the most stringent COVID restrictions and the idea of getting an outside appraisal, or frankly going into any brick-and-mortar store was almost unthinkable. I tucked them into my jewelry box and believed they had made the matter right.
In October of 2020 things had somewhat settled down, so I took these earrings to a very trusted and long-established jeweler to have them graded and appraised. Much to my surprise and chagrin, they graded worse than Hunt Country Jewelers had told me in color, clarity, total carat weight, and overall value. When I contacted Hunt Country about this, the owner assured me that she had specs on the diamonds asserting that her information was correct. I had to contact her multiple times via phone, email, and even dropping in to get this information. She did offer to have them graded out of the setting in front of me, but at this point, I had frankly lost trust in their information and decided to instead go to a third independent jeweler. I am sad, though not surprised, to report that the third jeweler concluded that the second jeweler, and NOT Hunt Country Jewelers, was accurate.
In conclusion, while the new stones were a relatively fair match to the originals, what I was most upset about was the dishonest assertion that they were a superior replacement to compensate me for the sentimental loss and then their defensiveness when confronted with this fact rather than a sincere apology. I clearly will not be darkening their doorway again in the future and would really caution you to think twice before you trust any jewelry you care about with Hunt Country Jewelers.
