Our Brick counter is a weekday counter, and that changes how you plan the visit
The Brick store is at 921 Cedar Bridge Ave and it keeps weekday hours only. Monday through Friday, 10am to 6pm. Closed Saturday, closed Sunday. That is the first thing to settle before you load the car, because clearing out a shore house is usually a weekend job and this particular errand cannot be one.
The trade off is worth understanding, because a weekday counter is a calmer counter. Nobody is queuing behind you while a buyer works through a bag of tangled chains one piece at a time. If what you are carrying needs an unhurried hour, a Tuesday morning is how you get an unhurried hour. Saturday rushes people, and rushed is how sellers stop asking questions.
A few practical notes. If you are bringing more than a shoebox, aim to arrive by about four so there is room at the end for questions rather than a scramble at closing. Call the store first on (732) 444-2094 if you are working to an estate deadline or bringing several boxes, and we will make sure a buyer is free rather than mid way through someone else's collection.
And if a weekday genuinely is not possible for you, do not just risk the drive. The last section on this page tells you exactly where you stand on a Saturday.
What twenty years in a shore house does to a box of gold and silver
Most of what crosses this counter has not moved in a very long time. Ocean County is full of houses that have been in the same family since the sixties, and the storage spots repeat themselves: the attic over an unheated garage, the back of a closet in a house that is shut up from October to May, a crawl space, a bedroom safe nobody has the combination for anymore, and a basement in a town that has taken water more than once.
Here is the reassuring half. The metal itself is largely indifferent to all of that. Gold does not rot. Silver does not lose weight when it darkens. A karat stamp does not fade. Whatever the gold content of a bracelet was in 1974, it is the same today, and no amount of damp changes the number on the scale.
What ages is everything wrapped around the metal. Paper, cardboard, rubber bands, soft plastic sleeves, sticky tape, cotton wool, felt lining. Those are the parts that fail, and when they fail they fail against the surface of the thing you are trying to sell.
Seasonal shore houses are the harder case, and it is not the heat that does it. It is the cycling. A room that is warm all afternoon and cold by midnight breathes damp air in and out of a closed box every single day for years. Steady conditions, even steadily humid ones, are gentler than a see saw. That is why a bank box and an attic can hold identical coins for the same twenty years and hand them back looking nothing alike.
None of this alarms us and none of it should embarrass you. We are on the shore. This is the normal condition of the things we buy.
| Where it was stored | What that does | What to do before you come in |
|---|---|---|
| Unheated attic or a crawl space in a seasonal house | Daily temperature swings pull damp air in and out of a closed box, so silver darkens unevenly and paper wrappers stiffen and shed | Bring the box exactly as it is. Do not repack anything into new holders |
| Soft, bendy plastic flips and sleeves from the seventies and eighties | Older soft plastic can break down against a coin and leave a green, slightly tacky film on the surface | Leave every coin in its flip. We will lift them out at the counter |
| Paper coin rolls and old bank wrappers | Sulphur in the paper tones the two end coins far more heavily than the rest, so a roll can look ruined at both ends and be untouched in the middle | Bring rolls sealed. We open them in front of you and count them out |
| Cardboard two by two holders with staples | Loose stapled holders sliding around a box scratch the coins in the holders next to them | Do not pull the staples out yourself. Lay the holders flat in a bag |
| A felt or velvet lined jewelry box, shut for years | Silver tarnishes deeply and the lining holds moisture against whatever is resting on it | Bring the whole box, lining included, rather than tipping it out |
| Rubber bands around a bundle of chains | Rubber perishes, bonds itself to the metal, and leaves a dark band exactly where it sat | Do not pick or peel it away. Removing it badly costs more than leaving it |
| A bank safe deposit box | Steady temperature and low humidity, so contents usually come out very close to how they went in | Bring any inventory slip with you so nothing is left behind in the box |
| A garage, shed, or a basement that has ever taken water | Salt air and standing damp attack the base metal parts first: clasps, hinges, pins, watch backs and holder staples | Keep anything that got wet in its own separate bag and say so at the counter |
Call the Brick store on (732) 444-2094, Monday to Friday 10am to 6pm
📞 Call the Brick Store: (732) 444-2094Do not clean a coin before you bring it in
If you take one sentence from this page, take that one. The single most expensive thing a seller can do between the closet and the counter is clean a coin. Not dropping it, not losing the box, not waiting another year. Cleaning it. A dark coin can be worth considerably more than the same coin made bright, and the polishing takes an afternoon while the loss is permanent.
The reason is that a coin has an original surface, and that surface is a large part of what a collector is paying for. Rubbing, dipping and scrubbing all remove a thin layer of it. Under magnification the damage is obvious: fine parallel scratching, blunted high points, a flat unnatural shine that no coin acquires by sitting still. Once that surface is gone there is no putting it back, and the coin drops out of the collector conversation entirely and into the melt pile, where it is worth its metal and nothing more.
So none of it. No silver polish, no silver dip, no baking soda and foil trick, no toothpaste, no pencil eraser, no vinegar, no ultrasonic bath, no scrubbing with a cloth to see what is under the dark. The rule holds hardest exactly where it hurts most, because the better the coin, the bigger the sum you can erase in ten minutes at the kitchen sink.
Sterling flatware and everyday gold jewelry are a softer case. When a piece is being bought purely for its metal, tarnish is irrelevant, and we are going to weigh it and test it regardless of how it looks. But you cannot always tell from a drawer which pieces are only metal and which carry a maker or a design worth more, and neither can a polish cloth. So the safe rule is the simple one, and it never costs you a cent: bring it dirty and let us look at it dirty.
Where it sat, and what to do about it on the way in
When a box lands on the mat, the first thing a buyer reads is not the coins. It is the container. How something was stored tells us what to expect before we have picked up a single piece, and it tells you what not to do the night before you visit.
The short version of the whole table below is: change nothing. Do not repack, do not sort, do not free anything that is stuck, do not throw away the ugly old wrapper. That battered envelope with someone's handwriting on it is sometimes the only record of where a piece came from, and handwriting on a coin envelope has settled more than one question at this counter.
Our coin dealers page for Brick goes into how coastal storage affects a coin's grade and how toning is priced. This table is about the earlier question, which is what the storage did physically and what you should carry through the door.
Three numbers, and why the order they arrive in matters
Your job here is short. Empty everything onto the mat and then watch three numbers land in the right sequence: what the piece is made of, what it weighs, and what the market is paying for that metal today. Sellers tend to focus on the third number. The order of the first two is what actually protects you.
Purity comes first, because until a piece is correctly identified it cannot be grouped with anything else. Stamps are a starting point and a good one. Ten karat is 41.7 percent gold, fourteen karat 58.5 percent, eighteen karat 75 percent, twenty two karat 91.7 percent. Sterling is 92.5 percent silver. A United States dime, quarter or half dollar struck before 1965 is 90 percent silver. But a stamp is a claim, not a proof, so every piece is checked with an analyzer that reads the actual composition without cutting, scratching or acid, and you watch the reading appear.
Weight comes second, and only after a piece is sitting in the right group. Reverse those two steps and the whole visit gets murky. Weigh a mixed heap first and you have a number that describes nothing, and any later disagreement about karat means unpicking the pile and starting again. Sorting first is what makes the arithmetic something you can follow line by line instead of a single figure handed over at the end.
The market rate comes last, applied to a purity and a weight you already saw established. That is the point of the sequence. By the time the day's rate enters the conversation, you are checking multiplication rather than taking anybody's word for anything. Ask for any number to be shown again. Nobody minds, and a buyer who does mind is telling you something useful.
Sorting does one more thing. It pulls out the pieces worth more than their metal before anything is weighed for melt: a coin whose date and mintmark change the answer, a stone worth removing and valuing on its own, a maker's mark on the clasp. Those are set aside and handled separately, because once a piece is in the melt group its individual character stops counting.
Walk in at 921 Cedar Bridge Ave, Brick, any weekday. No appointment needed
📞 Call the Brick Store: (732) 444-2094You leave with money or you leave with your things
There are exactly two ways to walk out of this store. Carrying payment, or carrying everything you carried in. There is no third version where we keep the ring and you keep a ticket, and knowing that in advance changes how the conversation feels.
We are buyers. We do not lend. Nothing you bring is ever held as security against money advanced to you, so there is no interest running, no due date to remember, no reclaim fee, and nothing to come back and rescue in ninety days. Lending against goods is a different trade with different paperwork and different risks for the customer. Ours is the plain one: we agree a figure, we hand it over the same day, the piece becomes ours and the money becomes yours, and the transaction is finished before you reach the parking lot.
The other half of that is what happens when you say no. Saying no is free. There is no charge for the evaluation, no fee for our time, nothing withheld and nothing kept back. You put your items in the bag, we say thanks for coming in, and that is genuinely the end of it. People do exactly this. Some come back a month later and some never do, and both are fine.
We will always explain how a figure was built, piece by piece, and we will write it down for you. Take that breakdown somewhere else and compare it if you want to. A seller who understands the arithmetic is easier to deal with than one who does not, which is why we would rather spend the extra ten minutes on it.
Where you stand on a Saturday
Brick is closed Saturday and Sunday and that is not changing, so rather than let you drive to a locked door, here is the honest picture across all eight of the family's stores, listed alphabetically. Aberdeen is open Saturday 11am to 4pm. Brick is closed. East Brunswick is open 10am to 3pm. Farmingdale is open 11am to 4pm. Manalapan is open 10am to 3pm. Middlesex is open 10am to 4pm. Millstone is open 10am to 3pm. New Brunswick is closed. Every one of the eight is closed on Sunday, without exception.
We are not going to describe those other counters to you, because they are not the counter we stand at and it would be guesswork dressed up as local knowledge. What we can tell you is that the hours above are accurate, that it is the same family business under the same name, and that the way an offer is built does not change with the address.
For anyone in the Brick and Toms River stretch of the shore, though, the weekday trip is still the better trip. It is the shortest drive, it is the least rushed hour, and it is the counter that sees shore storage every week and is not surprised by any of it. Call (732) 444-2094 on your way if you want to be sure someone is free when you arrive.
Brick gold buyer FAQs
Is the Brick store open on Saturday?
No. Brick is open Monday through Friday, 10am to 6pm, and closed both Saturday and Sunday. It is a weekday counter. If Saturday is your only option, Aberdeen, East Brunswick, Farmingdale, Manalapan, Middlesex and Millstone all open on Saturdays, and all eight stores are closed on Sunday.
Should I clean my coins before I bring them in?
No, and this is the most important thing on this page. Cleaning removes the original surface of a coin, the damage is visible under magnification, and it cannot be undone. A cleaned coin often drops to the value of its metal alone. Bring coins dark, dusty and untouched, however unappealing that feels.
My silver flatware is almost black. Should I polish it first?
Leave it. When a set is being bought for its silver content, tarnish makes no difference to weight or purity, so polishing gains you nothing. And if a piece happens to carry value beyond its metal, polishing can take some of that value with it. Bring it as it came out of the drawer.
Everything came out of a damp shore house and looks awful. Is it a waste of a trip?
Almost never. Gold does not corrode and silver does not lose weight when it darkens, so the metal value is intact regardless of how the box looks. What suffers is the packaging, and sometimes the surface of individual coins. Bring it in and let us tell you which is which.
Do you lend money against gold, or hold it as security?
No. We buy, we do not lend. Nothing you bring is ever held as collateral, there is no interest accruing and no date by which you have to reclaim anything. We agree a price, we pay it that day, and the transaction ends there.
How is my offer actually worked out?
In three steps and in this order. First we establish what each piece is made of and group it by purity. Then we weigh each group. Then we apply the current market rate for that metal. Doing it in that sequence is what lets you follow the arithmetic yourself instead of being handed one final number.
Can I sell part of what I bring and keep the rest?
Yes. The offer is built up piece by piece and group by group, so you can accept some of it, decline the rest, and walk out with whatever you would rather keep. Declining costs nothing, there is no charge for the evaluation and nothing is retained.
Do I need an appointment for a large estate lot?
Walk-ins are welcome any weekday during opening hours. For a large estate lot, several boxes, or anything on a legal deadline, call the Brick store on (732) 444-2094 first so a buyer can set aside enough uninterrupted time for it.
Which towns is the Brick store closest to?
The Cedar Bridge Avenue store is the closest Cash 4 Gold Trading Post counter for most of the northern Ocean County shore, and we see sellers regularly from Bay Head, Beachwood, Island Heights, Lakewood, Lavallette, Mantoloking, Ocean Gate, Pine Beach, Point Pleasant, Point Pleasant Beach, Seaside Heights, Seaside Park and Toms River. If you are coming from further up the coast or inland toward Monmouth County, check the locations page first, because another of the eight stores may be a shorter drive and open on a day that suits you better.