South Koreans Can Now Buy Gold Bars in Vending Machines
Gold may be considered a precious metal, but South Korea wants to make it easier to come by.
The Asian country will now let you buy gold from convenience-store vending machines, Bloomberg reported on Wednesday. At more than 30 GS Retail stores throughout the country, the machines are handing out gold bars as large as 37.5 grams, or 1.32 ounces. The price changes daily but starts at about 88,000 won ($64) for a half-gram bar.
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“Currently we are seeing about 30 million won of sales per month,” a GS spokesperson told Bloomberg via text. “The gold vending machine draws customers’ attention due to increasing demand for safe haven assets and the spreading trend of micro-investing.”
CU, another convenience-store chain in South Korea, started selling gold in April. Within two days, the one-gram ultralight gold bars had sold out, the parent company BGF Retail told Bloomberg. And as of May 31, 95 percent of the 770 gold products available had been purchased. Coming up, the stores will carry higher-weight options, too, from two-gram gold bars to 10-gram ones.
The demand for gold—whose market price hit a record high of more than $2,400 an ounce in May—may be surging among millennials and Gen Z, in particular. BGF said that most gold customers at CU stores were in their thirties. And younger people seem to be open to the micro-investing trend that the GS spokesperson mentioned: In the United Kingdom, for example, 65 percent of Gen Z and millennials said that they might invest in fractional shares of a company, which is less than one share, according to a Charles Schwab report cited by Bloomberg.
The easy availability of gold isn’t just limited to South Korea, either. American consumers were able to get in on the fun last year, when the big-box store Costco began offering gold bars among its giant tubs of pretzels and pallets of paper towels. Demand there was so high, Costco has actually limited each customer to two gold bars. When they hit the shelves, the one-ounce bars sell out in just hours.
Whether easy-access gold will prove to be just as popular in South Korea is an open question. Stay tuned.
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