Our family company sells graduation gowns and class rings (and some other stuff). Class rings is a small part (about 5%) of our total business.

Our major competitors are Jostens and Herf Jones. The majority of both of their businesses is class rings.

War, Katrina, oil increases, increase in wealth for China and India, and general world chaos has caused this to happen to the price of gold in the last year:



This skyrocketing increase in gold prices has got to be killing our competitors. Either they raise their prices to keep up with the gold prices, which causes fewer students to be able to afford a ring; or they don't increase their prices to keep up, in which case the cost of their good goes way up. Either way, they are majorly screwed.

We, on the other hand, benefit. Since it's only a small part of our business, we are not that impacted by a decrease in sales. However, because we have a ton of dead-rings (rings never paid for, or that had to be recast due to a flaw) that have gathered dust over the years because we lazily never melted them back down, we now have a massive profit from having simply sat on this small pile of gold rings.

In fact, we made more money from the dead-rings going up in value than we did from the actual good rings we sold this year.

So, world chaos + our laziness = profit.

Somehow, I do not recall that being taught in my macro-economics course...