After dropping $200 in two weeks, gold buyers were hit hard.

I just got off the phone with the owner of gold buying store. You know -- the kind that entrepreneurs open up on just about every street in America offering to buy old gold, broken jewelry, mismatched earrings, and then they buy the gold at 50% of market prices and sell it quickly to refiners for a quick profit.

The gold store owner told me he was taking a bath because the price of gold tumbled $200 in two weeks.

"Are you really taking a bath?" I asked him. "No, but it cut my profits deeply," he answered.

Remember, these gold buying stores are not paying generous prices. You should always shop around.

But there is also something you should be aware of now: because gold did tumble and these gold buyers who didn't unload their gold quickly to refiners have suffered a 'paper loss" which might make them even stingier when they buy new gold in the coming weeks.

In fact, as gold prices fall, gold buyers get stingier and stingier. If you are interested in selling scrap gold, you might want to wait till gold is on an uptrend again. When gold is moving up, buyers will big more to get it.

And when prices are falling, they are less inclined to make new purchases fearing they could get stuck in a day or in just hours if the market price falls some more.