A Historic Quarter for SD Bullion and Current Business Update
Thanks to our amazing customers and partners, SD Bullion has seen significant growth throughout the entire Q1 of 2023. In what was a steady market, we offered best in market value via competitive premiums as buyers were less active than usual. Our customers responded overwhelmingly, clearly supporting the decision to reduce premiums where we were able to do so. The leadership of this company invests in precious metals personally, so we understand the value of affordable physical.
As we have grown, we have continued to hire as many people as possible to join our team and service the business. While we’ve been successful in some ways, we admit that what we have done has not been enough to prepare for what occurred in early March.
On March 10th, we all woke up to the news of the Silicon Valley Bank collapse; which sent a ripple effect through investors worldwide. There has been and continues to be a massive influx of demand as savvy investors are now evaluating counterparties, including banks, in a more scrutinizing fashion. The takeaways from the banking collapses have been clear: you don’t own what you don’t hold. As a company, we went from “extremely busy, but keeping up” to “all hands on deck” overnight. Orders came in waves, and the amount of metal per order more than doubled. The bottom line is bigger orders take longer to ship than smaller orders.
This perfect storm has created very difficult challenges in the short term at SD Bullion, both internally (our phone queues flooded with calls that there simply aren’t enough man hours to answer) and externally (customers are experiencing delays outside of our normal shipping time frames as we endeavor to push out every order possible daily).
We have been aggressively hiring since mid-February and we continue to do so. We’ve raised wages, offered higher signing and referral bonuses, and restructured teams to maximize available support to shipping and phone teams. Everyone at SD Bullion, top to bottom, has been diligently working to get us out of this hole. In short: it has simply not been enough and we continue to under-deliver in ways that we won’t accept.
To our customers, we hear your frustration with the delayed shipments. We share that frustration and will not slow down until it’s remedied in full and we have scalable solutions in place to prevent it from happening again. There’s a lot we’ve learned from this experience. We are the fastest growing bullion dealer in the world; we thank our customers as they are responsible for that growth. As a company, we’re pushing through growing pains and we will continue to improve in every way that matters to our customers.
Where Do We Stand Today?
As we write this we are currently 7+ business days behind our normal shipping time (which is 1-3 business days after your payment clears our account). For the time being, we’re pausing additional planned promotional (“On-Sale”) activities while we focus all attention on servicing existing orders in the system. Also, we’re temporarily raising the minimum order total required for new orders to $500.00 USD. This will allow us to better deliver on all orders and reach operational efficiencies faster.
We plan to post an update here weekly until we get back to the standard service and shipping experience our customers have come to enjoy for more than 10 years now.
Thank you to everyone’s support and patience with us. If you’ve placed an order with us; you will receive it in full, it just might take a few extra days for us to get it out the door. For that, we deeply apologize for it taking longer than it should.
Sincerely,
SD Bullion Executive Team
Correct me if I’m wrong but, in a collapsed economy, precious metals will not work well. How will the average trading partner determine the value? Today it is worth…oh heck…the computer is down. Besides, I don’t have a scale and purity test kit. Did you shave some from this piece? No, we will either go with a CBDC or the MARK both of which are bad. For those of us averse to that we will be trading knives and blankets for beaver pelts and hoping no one stole our canoe so we can get back to our stash.
James Wesley Rawles covered metals testing and payments in one of his sequels. A good scale is $130.
While the rest of the world beholden to the Dollar system will suffer along with the US, The commodities rich and shunned alternative economies are not going anywhere. They will not be ditching coal and oil and gasoline and natural gas any time soon or idiotic “Green” concerns, and if we are lucky they will content themselves to looting our former vassal states and we don’t get nuked.
The alternative system they are building appears to be putting much of its credibility into gold holdings, which means there will be functioning international markets and a daily price on everything in the marketplace. I agree that if things are bad enough in America that we are in the dark and have no shortwave radio reception, commerce and getting the price of things right with PM’s might be a problem. Still, we know roughly what they are worth before the lights went out, and we can likely still barter value for value with the neighbors until a bit of normalcy returns. People the world over figured it out with PM coinage for centuries back when it took a month to ride a horse from Boston to Virginia and many months for a sailing ship to cross the Atlantic and return. Daily spot prices are nice, but life and commerce will go on without them.
I am not unaware of the threat to everyone’s liberty that the CBDC represents. It must be resisted at all mortal cost. Fortunately it requires a stable society and a working power grid, which makes it vulnerable to a disruptive insurgency. I also point out that the criminal traffic in drugs, and guns, people, bootleg alcohol, cigarettes, and even criminal kickbacks has always been beyond the ability of a central authority to control. Most of Mexico is ruled today by criminal organizations catering to wanted commerce because the desire for the forbidden commerce is a bigger demand than fear of government authority for the parties involved. If the US kills its own greenback to make them useless, These cartels will shift to something else. I don’t see the massive illicit drug economy just throwing its hands up and going “oh well, guess we are out of business since we can’t use cash dollars for transactions.” They will find another store of value and carry on. It is likely they will turn to the Brics currency, real or counterfeit. The rural American freeholder can do the same once things are stable enough to allow it. Gold and silver will have a value to someone, somewhere.
The wise would have a scale or two, one electronic and one mechanical with full set of weights. Additionally, those test kits for gold karat content and test kit for silver are fairly inexpensive. I purchase doubles of all last year for under five hundred dollars. One rule of preparing is giving yourself as many options as possible for all situations, Another rule, two is one and one is none.
SD Bullion is a good company in my experience and appears to be owned by a Christian. (There is a verse printed inside the lid of the shipping box).