Bad experience @ Davanam Jewellers

I was planning to write it down for quite some time and finally managed time to do it. Just before Akshaya Tritiya in 2011, my wife wanted to purchase a necklace and after searching in many places we finally ended up at Davanam Jewellers on commerical street, Bangalore. In my view our budget for necklace was good enough, but it was never in the eye of the jewellers. You do get their view point based on interest with which the salesperson displays their collection. My wife liked one of their necklace, however we wanted to explore more stores at commercial street. We left the store just to return back in less than 30 minutes as my wife had already made up her mind.

Their making charges and wastage are pretty low(16%), and I was really impressed by that. In general, it will be 17-18% at other jewellers and then they will come down to 16% after much bargain. Till this point it was all good, and then our experience started to turn sour.

I wanted to sell my 24 carat gold coins and get that amount adjusted in the necklace. Now they have a different gold buying and selling rate(Selling rate - Buying rate = Rs 50 ). Probably other jewellers do the same, but I am not aware of that. Most of the jewellers will not tell you their buying rate in terms of selling rate. They just say 22 carat rate + 8% as buying rate. GRT was even better at that time, as their buying rate was 22 carat rate + 9%. So when I calculated Davanam's buying rate, it came out to be <7% of their 22 carat gold rate. So I asked them reduce the cost by giving some discount citing the example of other jewellers. However salesperson we were interacting with was not at all cooperative. I thought it was best to talk to their manager. However interaction with their manager was main cause of my anger and frustration till now. He did not reduce any amount at all. When I tried to further reason out with their manager quoting that other jewellers are offering 8%+ over 22 carat gold rate, he told us that we must have gone to some local jewellers as no one gives more than what they are offering. This really made both of us very angry and we left the store immediately. However they sent one of their other salesperson behind us. He requested us to come back and promised that they will work out a better deal for us. So we went back and they reduced our total amount further by 0.8%. The manager tried to ignore us and never apologized for his rude behavior. I didn't want to discuss this further with them and started the billing process. Now the salesperson who was originally handling us had told us about silver coins offer with every purchase they had for Akshaya Tritiya period. However that offer was silently withdrawn from us as they have gone out of the way to give us further discount. It was only told to us when we asked back about that offer. Anyways we billed and got the stuff home. But our pain didn't end there. My wife had worn the necklace couple of times, and one of its joint has already come loose. So we will have to go back to Davanam jewellers to get it repaired. So the great experience @ Davanam jewellers continues ...