Be cautious and carefully document each step of your transaction, supervising its execution wherever possible. It's foolish to trust anyone.
I believed that I had sent Northern Refineries just over 20 lbs. gross weight in sterling silver flatware and other items for refining, but in the final settlement statement enclosed with the check that it ultimately mailed Northern Refineries reported that it had actually received delivery of only 12.6 lbs. gross weight in total.
The data within the one-page settlement statement was exceedingly sparse, but on the assumption that the high-quality Gorham and Westmorland sterling that I sent to Northern Refineries had a purity approaching the 92.5% American/British standard the settlement statement implies that Northern Refineries had also isolated and discarded as non-sterling filler 6.5 lbs. of the 12.6 lbs. total weight whose delivery it did acknowledge.
In a telephone conversation that took place after I'd sent an email expressing my disappointment with and skepticism about the amount of the final settlement the firm's Stuart Avig told me that Northern Refineries did not as a matter of business routine generate written or photographic records documenting the composition of orders delivered to its premises for processing. In a subsequent general discussion of the topic of filler he also explained that the knives included in a set of sterling flatware, for example, often had blades of stainless steel, and moreover might conceal within hollow sterling handles metallic rods and/or acrylic or similar difficult-to-remove cements, but in addition to his recitation of facts like this (with which I was already more or less familiar) Mr. Avig was unable to enlighten me in particular about the sources of the 52% implied filler content of my own sterling-processing order.
With the benefit of hindsight I reproach myself for the omission of several measures that I could have taken along the course of this transaction to protect myself against its outcome. I should not have permitted employees at the local UPS center to persuade me to pay them a small fee to "safely" re-package my order for shipping. Before closing and sealing up the box for shipment myself, I should also have enclosed with its contents an already-existing detailed written inventory of the shipped items and their weights, a step that I had actually intended but then forgot to take; Mr. Avig protested that if such a shipping document had been found within the box the discrepancy between his numbers and my own would have been brought to my attention soon after its arrival in Michigan. Northern Refineries does not as a matter of routine supply its customers with interim reports on the status and progress of its order processing, either; perhaps I should have insisted upon more disclosure of details along the way.
Before selecting Northern Refineries for this transaction I did take care to verify that the firm had been in business since at least 2008 and enjoyed a clean reputation with the Better Business Bureau. On the other hand something unmistakably went very wrong somewhere with my own order, although for reasons some of which are given above I am unable to exclude the possibility that UPS employees, for example, may instead have been chiefly to blame for the loss that I eventually suffered.
I should add, however, that Northern Refineries' website advertises a quick turnaround of transactions within five to twelve business days after receipt of a customer's order, and informs potential customers that settlement will be based upon the spot price of silver bullion on the day that processing of the order is concluded. By the time that Northern Refineries notified me of settlement on the eleventh business day following UPS delivery, the spot price of silver bullion had finally declined to its 5-year low of $13.65 per Troy ounce, a new low from which it began to recover as soon as the low was reached; if Northern Refineries planned to apply the proceeds of my transaction to a short position in silver bullion it could not possibly have chosen a more advantageous moment to announce the closeout of my order. read more
