Cash for Your Precious Family Heirlooms: Silver, China, and Crystal That Has to GO!

March 14, 2020 – Selling Your Family Heirlooms – Silver, China, and Crystal – at Replacements

A few weeks ago a Northern Virginia friend told me about selling her Waterford Crystal to a fine china and crystal dealer in Richmond – she’s been divorced for over ten years and doesn’t want that “stuff” anymore.  She and a friend made the trek to Richmond, visited some family and had a very successful visit with this dealer to turn her crystal into cash and offload some of her stuff.

That got me thinking.  Hubbie and I are preparing for a household move to another state so we are working hard to lighten our load and purge some of our possessions.  Maybe I should consider selling some of our crystal, china, and silver pieces – and maybe we could do better than if we just had a yard sale!

I took a different direction than my friend who used the dealer in Richmond.  I’ve known of Replacements, Ltd. in North Carolina for years.  We’ve driven by and seen it just off Interstate 40, east of Greensboro, North Carolina, many times. They sell old discontinued patterns to help families replace broken dishes.  I figured that must mean they buy all those pieces from somebody…would they buy old stuff from me? Our new house is only about an hour from there perhaps we could make a side visit to Replacements on our next trip to the new house.

I started working on this “selling my old family stuff” project by visiting the Replacements website.  It is very well organized and easy to navigate. It did take a little digging to find how you can sell YOUR stuff to THEM (“Other Services” > “Sell to Us”). It’s much easier to find the parts of their website where they sell THEIR stuff to YOU, of course!

There are two aspects to selling your stuff to Replacements.  The fun starts when you try to identify what you have to sell.  You need to figure out your piece’s manufacturer and pattern name.  Some china manufacturers stamp their name on the back of the dishes, sometimes even including the pattern name. That makes it easy. If the name isn’t stamped on the piece and it’s a piece that you bought, you may still have the receipt with the name on it.  Or perhaps if it was your wedding china, you might have a copy of your registry gathering dust somewhere – that registry should have the pattern names listed on it.  Otherwise there are thousands of photographs on the Replacements page to help you match to your pattern. My memory was jogged for the name of my Pfaltzgraff pattern (“April”) by flipping through all the Pfaltzgraff pattern photos on Replacements’ website.  The photography is good so you have a pretty good chance of finding your pattern just by flipping through the pages. Alternatively, if you can’t find your pattern, Replacements will help you figure it out – more on that later.  

In addition to the Pfaltzgraff everyday pieces I wanted to sell, I also had Royal Albert and Hammersley fine china that I didn’t want any more.  Those manufacturers printed the company name and the pattern name on the back of the pieces.  China will garner you a very wide range of prices for selling, so keep an open mind.  More about pricing coming up.

As to the silver and silverplate flatware that my Mom gave me when she was downsizing in late retirement…well. Silver and silverplate is much harder to identify due to the size of the items. I spent a lot of time with a jeweler’s loupe in my hand staring at the tiny stamped writing on the back of silver spoons that Mom had collected over the years. I think she’d just pick up a teaspoon here and there when she visited thrift stores or yard sales.  My parents were coffee drinkers and, as such, Mom kept a cylindrical crystal spoon holder full of silver and silverplate teaspoons on the kitchen table at all times, so Mom and Dad could stir the cream and sugar into their coffee at breakfast and dinner.  I ended up with ten different spoon patterns!  If the silversmith and pattern is a mystery to you, there are other good websites to help you identify the maker’s marks. Google “identifying silverware patterns” to find them.  Some of the silver makers’ marks are a little obtuse or too generic (like “HH”  – who is that supposed to be?) and some are images (is that a boat? a shield? an anchor?), so you have to do some digging and some comparing with the photos online. If you still can’t figure it out for yourself, Replacements has a “I Don’t Know My Pattern” webpage to get their help on identifying some of my patterns. You provide a photo and the dimensions of the piece through their website. Unfortunately, when I asked, they couldn’t help me much.  They couldn’t identify my oddballs either!

Once you know your manufacturer and pattern, it’s time to ask for an “Offer to Buy” from Replacements via the webpage.  This is the sequence:  you establish a customer number by giving them an email address.  You identify your patterns one-by-one. Then they’ll send you a listing of all the pieces, specific to your pattern, that were ever manufactured – with a price for the pieces they will buy.  This is your “Offer to Buy,” good for 30 days. You can use Offer to Buy to identify which pieces you want to sell.  Then either you visit Replacements or you ship what you want to sell to them within 30 days. If you miss that window, of course, you can ask for another Offer to Buy.  Sometimes I received the Offer to Buy within a few hours, sometimes it took up to their maximum-stated 5 days. 

Now a disclaimer to everything I’ve written above:  sadly, Replacements may not want to buy what you have to sell. Or they may offer you such a low price, you might as well donate to a charity thrift store (and deduct it on your taxes) or try to sell it yourself at a yard sale. For example, my Pfaltzgraff April pattern pieces were priced in reverse to what I thought they would be. I had four everyday little bowls and three large, interesting-shaped serving pieces. They offered me $1 and $2 each for the large serving pieces and they offered me $5 to $7 each for the little bowls! That’s bizarre! But you can figure out that their pricing is all based on supply and demand. That’s why your pattern-specific Offer to Buy is only good for 30 days.  Their prices are constantly being updated by their evaluators, appraisers and inventory technicians.  (Hubby and I couldn’t imagine how the pricing was done before computers, but some old Replacements catalogs gave us the impression that pricing and valuations were done on an annual basis. You could image they would have a large inventory of some patterns and pieces and run out of stock on others by the end of any catalog year, right?)  So with the upside-down prices on my Offer to Buy for Pfaltzfraff April, I decided I’d sell them little bowls and keep the $1 and $2 serving pieces to sell at a yard sale at our house before we move!  Wish me luck!

Replacements was not interested AT ALL in any of the silverplate flatware I wanted to sell. When I was a child, we used silverplate as our everyday knives, forks and spoons.  Just like silver, you don’t want to put the silverplate in the dishwasher, so we had to handwash all the utensils after every meal.  And, of course, they had to be polished from time to time to manage the silver tarnish.  What a pain!  In 2020, I don’t want to use those pieces, then handwash and periodically polish my everyday utensils!  I think the issue was that back in the 1960’s and 1970’s, most stainless steel utensils looked like they came from a school or prison cafeteria.  If you wanted something nice but less expensive than solid silver for everyday, you bought silverplate.

Thinking about why I have all this silver…did I say my Mom liked silver?  I think it was her attempt at hedging against the poverty she experienced growing up during the Great Depression.  Metals like gold, silver and platinum would always have value, so maybe to her thinking if you kept some precious metals around – just in case – you could sell them during the next big economic downturn in order to buy bread and milk.  I guess it worked out better than investing in beanie babies!

As our move date approached, I hustled and identified (or photographed and had Replacements help me identify) over twenty-five patterns!  I wanted to sell silver flatware, silverplate flatware, silver hollowware (sterling silver serving pieces like creamer, sugar, etc.), china and crystal/glass.  As I wrote above, Replacements wasn’t interested in buying ANY of the silverplate.  They also “couldn’t identify” or were “not purchasing” any of the family crystal/glass.  They wanted the Pfaltzgraff dishes but didn’t offer enough cash.  I also had some nice Lenox serving pieces but they weren’t interested in those (why not? they’re pretty!).

The next step depends on whether you are going to ship your items or visit in person.  Since we planned on visiting, I can’t tell you about packing your stuff.  However, we saw hundreds of boxes other folks had shipped to Replacements – just waiting in the warehouse, ready to be appraised.

If you want to visit in person you need an appointment. I called Replacements about 10 days in advance to pick a time to visit on our next trip to central North Carolina.  The appointment scheduler wanted to know exactly how many patterns and how many pieces I would be bringing in order to budget enough time for the evaluator to figure out how much it was all worth. Then they would cut me a check!

At our appointment time, when we arrived at Replacements, we used the special Sellers’ door not the retail entry.  We entered a gigantic metal building with row after row of enormous shelves, huge stacks of cardboard boxes and, in the distance, floor to ceiling (a 50-foot ceiling!) shelves.  So many shelves!  We were greeted and asked to wait a moment while another seller was finishing her appointment. 

For this visit, I expected to sit next to the appraiser-evaluator as they checked out my pieces.  But the person who welcomed us said but that Replacements is not like an Antiques Roadshow kind of scenario where you interact with the appraiser because that would take far too long. Darn!

I filled out a short form, she asked for the copies of my Offers to Buy and my identification, and asked for my cell phone number so that after the appraiser-evaluator was finished someone could call me on my cell phone to return to the sellers’ area of the building. I was very disappointed. I wanted to watch the process so I could learn about the stuff I was parting with. Instead, she took my box of stuff and my pile of papers and told me she would call in an hour or so when the evaluator was finished and then she (the greeter) would tell me how much my stuff was worth. Very disappointing!

At that point we were shown the path to walk from the back of the building, where the sellers’ entrance is, to the retail store at the front of the building. As we followed an orange line on the floor through the warehouse area to the retail store and museum, we saw sky-high shelves of inventory. The scope of this is hard to imagine.  Millions of pieces of china, crystal and collectibles. Think of that last scene in Raiders of the Lost Ark and you’ll have some comparison. 

We needed to entertain ourselves for over an hour, so we walked around the retail store and museum, helped ourselves to a cup of coffee and went on the official tour of the complex. Thankfully, they do warehouse tours every hour.

We enjoyed the tour.  It included lots and lots of statistics:  history of the place; how many pieces of china, crystal, silver, collectibles; how many of the 408 employees are related to one another, charitable works by the founder, and so on.  And “please don’t pick anything up as we’re walking through the shelves”.  (I only picked up one piece!  Oops!)  

On the tour, we saw all variety of china, silver, crystal and collectibles from Lladro to Mickey Mouse to old Roseville. After the tour, we went back to the retail store and asked about buying a couple of additions to our everyday flatware and china.  We just wanted to see if there were any pieces that we couldn’t resist or that we needed to add to our home Inventory. We decided that we would pick up a couple of teaspoons and another sugar spoon, another big serving fork and a couple of tiny little cocktail forks. Not exactly sure what we’re going to do with the tiny cocktail forks but they’ll be fun to use for parties.  I then got the cell phone call that it was time to go back to the sellers’ area where all of my china and silver was laid out on a workspace counter.  The woman who brought us in and took my box when we arrived walked us through everything that the evaluator had done. That reduced my disappointment a little because I got to learn a little bit more about my pieces.  As I packed the box back at home, I had also thrown in a couple of oddball extras for which I didn’t have Offers to Buy. The evaluator was very considerate about those and offered a little bit of money for each. The greeter lady then cut me a check for the pieces Replacements wanted to buy and a check for a 20% discount off the pieces that we had picked out in the retail store.  You get that 20% discount because you are a seller.  That was a nice perk.

I managed to sell 36 pieces of silver in ten different patterns and seven pieces of china in three patterns. The china was all mine but most of the silver was given to me by my mother – some of those spoons dated back to the early 1800’s (but some also dated to the early 1990’s!).  As my mom got into her nineties, she became a serious “let it go” and thin-out-your-belongings advocate, so I don’t think she’d mind my parting with any of it. Plus, I made a tidy little sum.  

As we try to thin out our belongings for our household move, it was great to get real money for some of the old stuff we’ve never used and don’t want to keep around.  I consider that I got very good prices for the solid silver pieces that I don’t want anymore.  Replacements in Greensboro, NC is just one place that will buy your family heirlooms.  Their reputation for fairness precedes them.  You can ship your stuff to them after you get your “Offer to Buy” or plan a visit.  You can also try ebay or rubylane or other online sources for selling your family heirlooms.  Then you don’t have to worry about your precious family heirlooms ending up melted down or crushed in a landfill.  Someone will certainly come along and love your family treasures again someday.

 Perhaps you’d like to get rid of some stuff, too!