alt Hacker News> That jewelry may very well be intended for resale the same way.
It isn't.
There is a widespread belief that jewelry is a durable investment, that if you fall on hard times you will be able to sell the jewelry for an amount similar to what you paid for it, or more.
It's fair to say that many people have this idea in mind when they buy jewelry, and that it pushes up the price.
But it isn't true; if you resell your jewelry you're going to get basically nothing compared to what you paid, unless you like to wear gold chains. The resale value of new jewelry is more like the resale value of a new car.
If there was any significant demand to resell jewelry, everyone would know this. The fact that they don't is sufficient to demonstrate that they have no intention of actually reselling.
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Some cultures hold a lot of household wealth in that format (predominantly-gold jewellery). South East Asia, North Africa, Middle East...
> It's fair to say that many people have this idea in mind when they buy jewelry, and that it pushes up the price.
Jewelry is the single biggest usage of gold, worldwide. It makes for nearly half of all the gold's reserve and usage. Jewelry alone represent as much gold as all the gold held by central banks and hoarded by individuals (be it bars or coins). There's also some gold use by various industries but that gold is often lost.
So it's fair to say that jewelry does, indeed, push gold's price up.
But maybe I misunderstood your comment.
You can sell jewelry for the same price as the equivalent weight in whatever purity of precious metals it is and I specified same weight in the parent comment. They won't be the same price originally, but that's not particularly germane to this discussion of whether there should be a sales tax on one vs the other.
And for what it's worth, people buy things for different reasons. It's very common for Indians to explicitly value jewelry as a wealth store (among other reasons), to give one example.