Years ago I was in a small hippie jewelry-store-cum-head-shop on Telegraph Avenue in Berkeley when a saftig young woman in a granny dress ran inside, panting and perspiring, and offered the proprietor a gold locket on a broken gold chain. "Sure, honey," he said. "I pay top dollar for jewelry just ripped off the necks of their owners. Get out of here before I call the cops."

I assume that since the young woman offered to sell the locket, that such transactions are possible, that perhaps she herself had successfully completed one or more such. But outside of hock shops, where would you go to raise money by selling your (or anyone else's) jewelry?

In Madrid, you don't have to look far.

"I buy gold," the signs say. "We pay the highest prices. €14 per gram." Despite the big signs, these businesses have rather marginal facilities. To get to one, you have to go through the souvenir store in front to get to the entrance. For the other, you have to walk up to the second floor—meaning, for we Americans, the third floor. You can bet there's no elevator.

What's notable is that there are several such enterprises within a block or two of each other. Is there enough gold for sale in Madrid to support more than one buyer?

Competition must be fierce. The buyers employ men wearing sandwich signs for promotion.

They offer to buy gold, silver, jewels and watches by Rolex, Cartier and the like. If you're wearing a Seiko, don't bother.

So what's going on here? Do pensioners cash in their jewelry to meet the spiraling cost of living? Are young people down on their luck trying to meet another month's rent? Maybe there are so many street thefts that it takes a whole block of buyers to handle the volume. Maybe they buy credit cards, too. in that case, they might have handled one of mine.

Whatever it is, it's weird. The streetwalkers don't hassle you. They just stand around smoking cigarettes all day, doing what has to be one of the world's most boring jobs. Sometimes they stand in clumps, two or three guys promoting competing buyers. They talk to each other, maybe about last night's game. Nobody seems to care.