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In the past two weeks, I’ve seen so many tweets about people ‘panic buying’ at Costco that I couldn’t keep track of them all if I wanted to. People talking about how hand sanitizer and toilet paper are selling out from the discount wholesaler while the same people freaking out about COVID-19 happily take free samples of food from Costco employees without any sense of irony.
Apparently, amidst all of the pandemic panic buying someone dropped $600,000 on a 10-carat diamond. Why did they choose Costco to make this purchase? Is this the single largest purchase in Costco history? Why didn’t they go directly to a jeweler? Who the hell spends $600,000 on a diamond?! Why is Costco even carrying diamonds worth hundreds of thousands of dollars?
I could go on and on like this because I have more questions than there will ever be answers but for now, let’s just check out the details of this story from Fox Business:
The warehouse retailer, whose products include higher-end jewelry, disclosed a transaction this week involving a gem that Marilyn Monroe once described in film as a “girl’s best friend.”
The high-value, large carat diamond sold “for over $600,000,” Chief Financial Officer Richard Galanti told analysts and investors during the company’s second-quarter earnings call.
The rock is a cushion-cut 10-carat solitaire, the company tells FOX Business, and is a portion of the 247,000 carats the retailer sold. The company would not disclose where the sale took place.
The high-water mark on prices for such transactions may be rising.
In May 2019, the discount retailer revealed it sold a diamond ring worth more than $400,000.
A quick scan of its current ring offerings shows six-figure prices range from roughly $103,000 to nearly $415,000 for a round brilliant-cut 10.03-carat stone.
I did a quick search of ‘diamond’ on Costco’s website and sorted price by ‘high to low’ and there are currently four diamond rings on there listed at over $300,000. This is just blowing my damn mind.
You can check out those high-end rings here on Costco’s website if you’re interested.
The sale of this outrageous $600,000 10-carat diamond was just one part of Costco’s quarterly earnings that exceeded expectations. Costco shares are up 5.9% this year which I suspect will be a pretty volatile number in the coming days due to the COVID-19 scare and people both wanting to buy in bulk and then being afraid to shop. Nobody knows how this will all shake out so we’ll just have to sit back and watch.
For more on this ring, you can click here.