I called ahead to Tony and went into the store today to sell two 12-place setting sterling silver…read moresets, one 8 place setting sterling silver set, and other assorted pieces. The employee seemed honest and transparent, but I was disappointed that Tony wasn't present. The employee began testing and weighing the silverware. Tony's wife, no name was given, showed up later; saying that she and Tony are co-owners. The behavior and actions that made me increasingly uncomfortable included: 1. Tony was supposedly sick and and took all of the weights and did all of the calculations via phone or Facetime while his wife was constantly pushing to get it done, 2. The first batches of silver were weighed in ounces and the remaining were weighed in grams, so it was hard more me to keep track of the actual totals, 3. None of the calculations done by Tony were ever visible, so I had to take his word for it, 4. Tony said that he used 1/3 of an ounce of silver for each knife and while Google isn't perfect, they said that the average was about 1/2 ounces per knife (I didn't know this till after the fact), 5. Tony's totals were 4,700 grams of silver and 350 grams estimated for the knives, but this was rounded down to 5,000 grams, 6. They made an offer based on the lower weight (again, no transparency on the method), 7. When I pointed out that a box of silver had not been weighed, Tony's wife blustered that it had all been weighed, when in fact, it had not (the employee confirmed that it had not been weighed). I was completely done at this point. I left the store with my silver, never to come back again. Due to the lack of transparency and the behavior of the co-owners, I do not trust this business to be honest. They offered $5,000 for everything. My calculations, using actual weight of Sterling Silver and small quantities of lesser amount of silver: Spot price $69.1/Oz, less 10% margin, $62.19/Oz net and at 28.35 grams per Oz, this net price is $2.19/gram. Weight at home was 8,242 grams, 42 resin filled handle knives and pie servers estimated 624 grams, total including estimate 8,866 grams, but multiply by 92% (Sterling is 92.5% silver) to account for some silver being less than 93%, which equals 8,156 silver grams. Multiply 8,153 silver grams by $2.19/gram spot price, net of margin, and you get $17,861. This did not count the box of silver that was not weighed in the store. You don't have to be a math genius to figure out that everything Hillcroft Gold Buyers did was a sham. You can't rely upon the Google reviews as only customers who sold gold or silver to the business are included in their Google reviews and a potential sale that backed out due to warning signs was not.
