I’m sure you’ve seen one of those Cash4Gold commercials by now which offers to buy your gold jewelry and send you cash for it. Much like whenever someone tells me they had their birthday dinner at an Outback steakhouse, every time I see one of those commercials, I think to myself “That’s really sad”. I think the worst part is where they show the clip of them actually melting down the jewelry, which should be captioned with “Here’s what we do with the heirlooms you wish you didn’t have to sell.” The commercial does a good job at depicting potential customers as normal, jovial individuals with gold items they no longer need, but in reality their motto should be something like “Because you need $30 in a really bad way.” That makes me sad.

The sadness continues beyond the commercial though if you go to the website of Cash4gold.com. They have a banner promoting their partnership with MC Hammer (pictured above holding a gold sledgehammer and exclaiming that he is “melting gold/dignity, baby”) to donate some of their proceeds to curing hunger. It’s like this business is designed to give me material to write about. Anyway, I hope Hammer got paid a little for that, but something tells me they may have just kicked him down a couple earrings someone mailed in and called it a day. Overall, I find their charity admirable, yet circular, as the people who need to sell their jewelry like this may be doing it so they can buy food. In that respect, they should just pay people more for the gold they send in if they want to help their hunger situation, but then there wouldn’t be the tax benefits of a charitable write-off and when that isn’t present, companies tend to be perfectly OK with letting others go hungry. The whole charity thing is just a way for them to seem a little more human because it is obvious that their business is more or less set up to take advantage of people who really need money just like the management training program at Enterprise Rent A Car from what I understand.

Oh, and did I mention they will also buy gold teeth? Um, yes they will buy gold teeth, and explicitly list them as one of the items they will buy on their website. How one actually acquires a gold tooth they can mail in is apparently an inconsequential detail. I hope they have systems in place to flag anyone that sends in more than a couple gold teeth, but somehow I doubt they have incorporated that as a field in their database. It just made me a little sad writing about people mailing in gold teeth for money. Then I thought about how awesome it would be if I ever got around to creating a doughnut with pieces of strawberry cheesecake inside and I got over it. Maybe that would make one of my gold teeth fall out which I could then get some money for. Interesting.

I’ve heard rumors that they will soon be launching Cash4children.com where you can put any unwanted spawn in a PrePaid crate, mail it in, and receive money the very next day. If the children have gold teeth, then their value is even higher. OK, not really, but I’m just saying…