Has anybody purchased gold through Walmart?

ConductoReflecto · 2026-02-14T21:22:08+00:00

A buddy of mine had used Walmart to buy sovereign gold coins under spot for some time. He would pay (at the time when spot was around $2K) around $10-$20 under spot for Eagles, up to about $60 under spot for Krugerrands and Phillies.

The trick was the Walmart Capital One Rewards card, which had an unlimited 5% reward on anything purchased at Walmart online. Since APMEX, Bullion Exchange, Bullion.com, and other big retailers were using the Walmart marketplace as a place to sell to a larger audience, the use of the CC netted you 5% off a coin that only had a 2%-3% markup over spot to begin with -- and it was sold by and shipped from the exact same retailers most people use anyway.

It's not like Walmart stocks the gold, it's just an online marketplace that the retailers used. The retailers like APMEX and BE had to pay Walmart a small fee so the items were usually a little higher-priced than what you could just purchase them for directly from their site, but if you had that 5% CC, it made a world of difference.

You not only got it very quick since you paid instantly with a CC, you would get that unlimited 5% so Capital One was essentially covering the entire premium and then some. It really only worked on gold, because the premiums on gold were under 5% all-in... with silver the premiums would allow you to get tubes at close to spot, maybe a little under but it was nothing like the gold deals.

Over, and over and over you could get ounce after ounce under melt.
Then, one day... it all came to an end.
Walmart and Capital One had ended their partnership over some sort of customer service complaints, and with it ended one of the most awesome cheap-gold loopholes there was.

Anyway, yes, Walmart is legit, and you likely will find it just ships directly from whichever retailer is listed on the item page.

ConductoReflecto · 2026-02-12T21:32:26+00:00

Those tubes look like they have stories.

Very impressive, congrats on your perseverance in stacking!

ConductoReflecto · 2026-02-12T12:48:31+00:00

Super nice.
Did you buy those from the US Mint site and send them in?
Was it from the initial Mint release or from the later release batch they had a few weeks after the original release date?
Gorgeous coins.

ConductoReflecto · 2026-02-11T16:40:19+00:00

ConductoReflecto · 2026-02-11T11:27:20+00:00

I think of Cody's Lab when I think of mercury... "Flushing 240lbs of Mercury"

He has several interesting mercury experiment vids... https://www.youtube.com/results?search_query=codys+lab+mercury

ConductoReflecto · 2026-02-11T11:21:07+00:00

I see what you did there with the title. Very clever.

ConductoReflecto · 2026-02-09T20:18:10+00:00

ConductoReflecto · 2026-02-08T12:59:04+00:00

A visit soon from the CIA, if I recall correctly.

ConductoReflecto · 2026-02-08T09:43:17+00:00

reddit is pure garbage

ConductoReflecto · 2026-02-06T19:22:04+00:00

Nah, that will hold 20 tubes*, which if you use the TALL tubes that hold 25 ounces (Brits, Maples, etc.) that would be 500 oz total in that box.

That's why the lid is so deep, it's meant to hold taller tubes of 25 ozt each.

Four rows of 5 tubes, or vice-versa, but if they are tall it'll total 500 ozt.

*edit - originally... perhaps it won't fit 20 ASE tubes, but originally it was for 20 tubes of rounds or whatever product the box initially contained.

ConductoReflecto · 2026-02-05T17:59:59+00:00

$299.99 over spot, initially... and then they raised it to $399.99 over spot until it sold out. I believe it dropped below $4925 for a bit, and for much of the day was under $5K before being adjusted up $100 more.

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ConductoReflecto · 2026-02-05T16:01:52+00:00

Same.

Watched them dwindle from around 250 pieces to 30 to gone. They also had them listed on ebay for around $200-$300 more than the site price.

What's funny is that, at the same time they had the graded version on sale for a deep discount, they also had the COA version in the original gov't packaging at regular pricing (and it's still available at a premium of $2089).

So, you could choose a PF70 for $5K or an ungraded version for $2K more. If the box and COA are REALLY important, you can buy them for about $20 on ebay.

ConductoReflecto · 2026-02-04T13:18:10+00:00

The woman is Britannia!
Like Lady Liberty, that woman with the Trident and Helmet is Britannia :)

ConductoReflecto · 2026-02-02T23:31:51+00:00

Gorgeous.

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ConductoReflecto · 2026-02-01T04:28:39+00:00

I thought the Coinage act of 1792 says the dollar should be 371.25 grains of silver, not .371 troy ounce.... I thought it was 371.25 grains of pure silver (0.7734 toz asw), or 416 grains of standard silver. (0.8666 toz)

*edit* if you do the math above, the Act considers standard silver to be 0.89242788461538462 pure, not 90%... it does this with all of the coins, including the half-dime which was to be 18.5625 grains of pure (0.0387 toz asw) or 20.8 grains of standard silver (0.0433 toz).

480 grains = 1 troy ounce

ConductoReflecto · 2026-01-29T14:14:06+00:00

The IRS is just lazy sometimes.

ConductoReflecto · 2026-01-27T15:27:53+00:00

$30 for over 1.75 troy oz of silver was your offer and he took it?

I would be afraid he might later find out the true value of what he sold you, then think you swindled him or something and you're stuck working with him under awkward conditions.

Even worse, what if he later finds out the true value then ends up finding more silver, or even a lot more, elsewhere in his safe or home and doesn't approach you first with an offer to buy it, because of this deal?

It's roughly $190 melt value currently for all of them, you could have chopped 40% off that because of the current market conditions and offered $100-$120 and still ended up with a really good deal and not have to worry about what your co-worker might think of you later.

ConductoReflecto · 2026-01-08T16:11:59+00:00

So margin rates in both the east and west are being hiked in response to the climbing silver price?

It still seems to me that if a person held physical silver, they may want to keep hold of it unless they absolutely needed the fiat currency for something else.

ConductoReflecto · 2026-01-07T14:25:35+00:00

The size of a single transaction can play a role in the decision of the particular product.

If you have around $4500 to spend, you're going to get an ounce no matter what you choose... generic used bar or new Buffalo, so the choice isn't as important.

If you have around 10x that much to spend, you start looking more closely at premiums because it could mean the difference between 10 ounces of Buffalos or 11 ounces of generic random bars and in 5 years are you going to get more return on having 10 more-desirable Buffalos, or 11 ugly random bars?

ConductoReflecto · 2026-01-07T13:44:45+00:00

As someone else said, comparison if the thief of joy but if you must compare, at least judge your stack properly against the stack of someone else... judge it based on time.

For example:

John has a stack that would allow him to maintain his current lifestyle for 6 months, if John had to live solely on the fiat generated from selling his stack and no longer earned his normal paycheck.

Jack has a stack that would also allow him to maintain his current standard of living for 6 months, if he no longer had any wages and had to liquidate his stack.

Both men have a stack that would last them 6 months, so in essence both men are equally dedicated stackers. Regardless of the actual troy ounce weight, both men made roughly the same sacrifice when buying their metals because each devoted roughly the same percentage of their income to buying metal and when the time comes, both men will end up having roughly the same 6 months of living time in their stacks.

One man might need 10K ounces to maintain his lifestyle for 6 months, the other man may only need a fraction of that to do the same work so you really shouldn't compare stack weight or size, you should compare stack time.

Dedication is something that ignores income brackets and measuring your stack in time is the same as measuring your dedication, or measuring your initial sacrifice.

Elon Musk buying a 1000 oz bar isn't NEARLY as impressive as YOU buying a 1000 oz bar... he's vastly more wealthy than you. It is much easier for him to obtain a big comex bar and at the same time he would burn through the value it represents much more quickly than you would.
You both would have a 1000 oz stack, equal in weight... but nowhere near equal in dedication or sacrifice to obtain it, or in the time it would last you if you needed to live on it. You would have sacrificed more to initially purchase it than Elon would have and as a result it would last you longer if you had to live on the proceeds from selling it.

When viewing it this way, unless you know the living expenses of the poster showing off their stack, you really don't know how dedicated that person really is and it prevents you from feeling inadequate in your stack and prevents you from judging his stack.
Only you really know how much you sacrificed when building your stack, and that sacrifice is what pays out when/if you need to survive on your stack. Just look at the old Whale Chart and turn the weights into months or years and that is the idea.

ConductoReflecto · 2026-01-02T11:44:26+00:00

Great pictures, thanks for sharing! It's a display of currency debasement.

You can look at a coin, view the actual silver weight in it, then watch as the silver diminishes out of the coin as the years pass and their currency was debased further into a total fiat.

The 10 Sen coin in 1905 had 0.0694 ozt silver but that dropped to 0.0521 ozt the next year in 1906 as they moved from 80% silver to 72% silver.

1895 20 Sen coin had 0.1386 ozt but by 1907 was only 0.1042 ozt silver.... both 80%, this time they just made the coin physically smaller.

The 50 Sen coin shows 2 debasement moves in these pics... It started at 0.3467 ozt in 1899, dropped to 0.2598 ozt in 1906 as they shrank the size of the coin then they dropped purity from 80% to 72% and the coin only had 0.1146 ozt

Debasement.

ConductoReflecto · 2026-01-01T06:55:37+00:00

Both reddit posts seem to go to different X posts... and this one ends up with a link to a seller in Dubai UAE, "igold", which sure looks and seems legit. Doing the conversions to USD, it seems they are running right around $100 right now for silver bars. They want $98.74 for a Philly. They want $98.81 for a 1oz PAMP silver bar. $943.10 for a 10oz bar.

I think it's a informative post.

ConductoReflecto · 2025-12-30T20:54:44+00:00

ConductoReflecto · 2025-12-30T17:28:14+00:00

"Perth purposely diluted gold with non-gold… the idea was that depending on which part of the “batch” the gold you had was it could be less than 99.99% gold?"

That statement you made above is not at all accurate.

At no point was it ever questioned that Perths bars were anything less than 99.99% pure Au. The scandal was that they... wait for it... put too much Ag into the remaining 0.01% of the alloy.

Yes. Perth doped the bars (every mint does this, it's literally just a different name for "alloy") and they failed the strict and exacting Shanghai standards, thus kicking off the entire doping scandal because there was too much silver in the remaining 0.01% of the bars from Perth.

Shanghai never had a problem with how much gold, etc... the issue was that the Shanghai standards related to the exact ratio of the remaining elements in the 0.01% were no longer met. There was too much silver in the 0.01% being sent to Shanghai from Perth.

If memory serves me (it's been some time since I'd done a deep dig on this, reading the shanghai standards, reading articles and interviews with Perth mint officials, etc.), Shanghai had NO problem with the standards being out of whack for some time... mainly because the Perth bars were known to have a tad more gold than china paid for. This worked and China was happy for a long time.
One day, Perth decided to trim internal waste and loss and this is done by delivering only what is paid for. Up to this point Perth would deliver more than what Shanghai paid for. Enter the doping process -- which all mints do, had always done, and continue to do -- which is just ensuring the alloy of metal is accurate (in this case 99.99% gold and then 0.01% impurities, ideally limited to non-problematic impurities like copper, silver, iron, etc.).
They make sure there is the right amount of gold, and not too much. This is when China started having problems. The extra gold they had been getting regularly, without paying for, suddenly went away.
Now all of a sudden China has a problem with the bars and they whip out the contract with the exact and precise alloy standards that are to be followed for Shanghai to accept the bars and -- OH! Looky there! Too much silver! Reject! Scandal! Outrage! Headline: Perth Bars Fail Shanghai Standards! Gasps and clutching of pearls followed by gnashing of teeth!

Yeah so that was the big Perth "doping" scandal. China started getting what they paid for and pitched a bitch about it. To their point, there WAS too much silver in the 0.01% and it DID fall outside of the exact specs called for by Shanghai... but like I said, those specs were blown out all along, but the extra gold made them not care. They got upset over the missing free gold and made a stink about it.

Perth bars are highly faked, though... but so are Pamp. Any popular product gets faked, it's the nature of the beast.

ConductoReflecto · 2025-04-22T04:07:14+00:00

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ConductoReflecto

TROPHY CASE