The Great Savers Jewellery Conspiracy

Ok, so here’s the deal. This is my first post. I was going to write kind of a ’so this is my name and this is my blog and blah blah blah’ style post but quite frankly:

a) it would be boring, and
b) I have somthing much more urgent to write about.

On this blog’s bloggy pages, it will soon become ragingly obvious that much of my vintage fossicking centres around the hunt for costume jewellery – I’m talking everything from rhinestone brooches to bakelite to Dynasty-worthy clip-on 1980s earrings. And the truly rad thing about looking for vintage jewellery (I’m mostly talking post 1940s here) is that there is still a lot of it out there, and that you can still get it for reasonable price.

All of this brings me to Savers, that mecca of crap, that tower of thrift, that repository for all things labelled ‘Girl Xpress’ or ‘Hot Options’, amongst which one can occasionally trawl out some true gooey vintagey goodness. Now, I’m the first to admit that I have my doubts about Savers – about the reclusive multimillionaire who apparently owns it, about the charity partners who only receive 3% of the eventual retail price of the things that are donated to them for free, and so on. In all honesty, I prefer the genuine ye olde style ‘op-shop’ to this ‘thrift department store’ notion.

However, one thing must be acknowledged -Savers had awesome jewellery. It was priced accordingly, sure – but they had great paste and rhinestone brooches, enamelled pieces, faux-pearl, signed and stamped work - in short, it was noticeably good, and there was a lot of it.

But recently, something has gone wrong. Very wrong. 

Here’s what happened. Summer came, the office where I work closed for two weeks (hurrah) and I used the time to do a lot of vintage snooping and sleuthing, much of it in four of the five Savers stores – I hit up Brunswick (too close to RMIT Brunswick and its fashion students – always picked over), Footscray (word up), Greensborough (I was in there for two hours and didn’t even realise) and Frankston (it has an ESCALATOR). I have purchased el-fabula jewels at all of these locations. But I noticed that all of them – ALL OF THEM – had no decent jewellery to speak of.

Sure, there was jewellery. But it was wall-to-wall junk. There was nothing truly vintage, or that even came close to the quality that was previously available. At first I thought it was just a problem at the Footscray store, and that the more outer-suburban branches would be better stocked. I was wrong. Again, junk – I’m talking stuff that someone probably bought at Diva for $4.95 or yanked out of a Christmas cracker.

I asked staff if anything had changed recently in terms of how jewellery is managed. They said no, although one mentioned that a new pricer had started working the jewellery not too long ago. Was this so called ‘pricer’ to blame for the evaporation of one of my greatest second-hand costume jewellery haunts?

To get an answer, I emailed customer services. FYI, here’s the email I sent:

Dear Sir/Madam,

I am a regular customer of several of the Savers stores in Melbourne,
Australia. Recently, I have noticed a sharp change in both the amount
(lower) and quality (lower) of jewellery – in particular the jewellery
available in display cabinets – at four of the five Melbourne Savers
stores.

Could you please tell me if there has been a change in the way in which
jewellery is managed recently? I have asked several staff members, who
were unaware of any change, although one mentioned that a new jewellery
pricer had commenced recently. Does this account for the noticeable and
sharp decline? Is quality jewellery going elsewhere, or have there been a
lack of donations?

A response to these queries would be greatly appreciated, as I was until
very recently highly impressed with both the quality and range of
jewellery available at Savers stores.

Yours Sincerely,
Chloe Wilson

And, much to my surprise, here’s the response I got from the Managing Director of Savers Australia. They sure have the turnover time under control:

Chloe

Thanks for your email.
There has been no change to our strategies for managing our jewellery departments. 
This product category remains one of our highest performing and we experience very
high sell throughs…..so perhaps this answers some of your question. 
With that said, we can only put out what we purchase from our charity partners and
unfortunately, we do not receive a lot of jewellery. 
As a result, we have had to supplement our offer with some new labels over the
summer/Christmas period which don’t have the same appeal as better quality and
antique pieces.
However, as a result of your email, I will bring this to the attention of my Store
Managers so that we can eliminate any internal theft threat to our assortments.
I really appreciate you bringing this to my attention.

Hmmmm. I appreciate the prompt response – and hope something happens as a result of it – but this e-mail has raised more questions than it’s answered. Most disconcerting among them:

1) How can Savers bring in ‘new labels’? What does this mean?
2) What is the ‘internal theft threat’? Did I just get someone into trouble (oh-oh)?

In my opinion, the change was just too sharp and too widespread to be theft. If the quality doesn’t pick up again by the end of the summer, someone might just be siphoning the good stuff off elsewhere. Perhaps it can get more at auction or by being on-sold to other, higher-priced vintage retailers. I’ll keep my eyes peeled for further developments.

Stay tuned in the meantime, vintage lovers. The Detective is on the case.