Costco gold bars are a hit with millennials? Not so fast
For those of you who don't work in the media business, I'll let you in on a little secret: Editors love trend pieces. These are stories that call attention to a new fad in clothes or dating or whatever. They are easy to write—just find an example or two of someone doing something mildly surprising, and frame it as part of a larger trend in culture or society. And if your evidence is a little thin, well it doesn't really matter: Readers will gobble up the story all the same. Here's a case in point from the Wall Street Journal, which has a trend piece about the popularity of Costco's one-ounce gold bars among younger consumers:
“Craig Beauregard and Julia Edwards were at Costco shopping for groceries in December when they spotted a deal that was too good to pass up: a one-ounce bar of gold. Beauregard, 33 years old, checked his phone and saw the bar’s retail price of $2,069 was $3 below its on-the-spot price in financial markets. They threw it in their shopping cart next to a seven-pound bag of frozen chicken and a carton of Kirkland eggs. Americans can’t get enough gold.”
It's a great story—millennials are so worried about the future they're throwing gold into their shopping carts with the eggs!—but, as they say, the plural of anecdote is not data. To be fair, the Journal does make a half-hearted effort to show that Craig and Julia are not just prone to impulse buying, but part of an honest-to-goodness trend. The paper not only quotes two other thirtysomething buyers of Costco gold bars (three examples and you have a trend!) but cites a State Street study that finds the "average millennial allocates 17% of their investments to gold...while Gen X and baby boomers invest 10% of their portfolio in the metal."
Hmm. I'm not a millennial, but I know plenty of them and I would be very surprised if they are putting 17% of their wealth into gold. I poked into that study to find the methodology, and here's where that number comes from: an online poll conducted by a gold ETF of 1,000 people who had $250,000 in investments of which 25% were millennials. In other words, that 17% figure is based on 250 affluent people who opted to take a gold company's survey.
That's the sort of thing that gets you an F on a statistics paper but, fortunately, this is a trend piece so it doesn't really matter. What does matter is the Journal story is fun fodder for debate about whether you should buy gold in these uncertain times. And, since this is nominally a column about crypto, whether you should buy Bitcoin instead.
I can see the appeal of gold—it looks cool and has been a store of value across nearly every culture for thousands of years. And if all the banks collapse, well you can always dig up the Costco gold bars you buried in the backyard and try to barter your way through the surrounding anarchy. But there are drawbacks: It's hard to spend, hard to sell, and, if you live in a state like mine, you're down over 7% right away because of sales tax. Bitcoin, on the other hand, is easy to divide and more liquid—but it's been a store of value for barely 15 years and its network has yet to be tested in true Mad Max conditions.
There's also the question of volatility. Bitcoin fell nearly 80% in its last swoon while, in recent times, the most gold has fallen is around 30%. But more recent, ahem, trends show gold is up around 12% while Bitcoin is up 58% and that no one who has bought and held Bitcoin for three years has suffered a loss. None of this is investment advice, so you'll have to decide for yourself. For my part, I'm looking forward to the day Costco sells Bitcoin so I can write a trend piece of my own.
Jeff John Roberts
jeff.roberts@fortune.com
@jeffjohnroberts
This story was originally featured on Fortune.com
