I'd love to see an economists take on the value to a consumer of holding gold in this form, at the price. Investment gold is usually kept in vault, and you trade ownership arms length. Direct gold ownership is rife with risks: fineness, substitutions and overpriced purchase. Yes, you can always sell at a mall gold trader but that's way way off market price. So it's an inflation hedge with a lot of cost and risk and d…
You can see it happening right now in Argentina: the local currency is worthless, and people are flocking to ... US Dollars. Not gold, not bitcoins, but good old benjamins. So gold isn't even a good inflation hedge: if you walked the streets of a failing economy (pick one: Argentina, Venezuela, Sri Lanka, there's plenty more) and tried to exchange gold for goods, you're not gonna get far (and will probably get mugged…
You must understand: Most Americans are not accustomed to shoving a third party currency under their mattress, or buying physical gold. The phenomenon of hyperinflation is foreign to them, and there's a steep learning curve.
The actual significance of this is that metal is being offered at a "blue dollar" rate by one of the three largest retailers in America. Prior to there being any concept of blue dollars here. This is going to influence spot prices. The people buying this are too stupid to even go to their local coin dealer. (Which I do, sometimes, go to my local coin dealer - and trust me - the people there to buy are generally pretty stupid).
If I had an hour, I'd like to expound on the significance of Americans buying precious metal at a loss through a giant vertical monopoly. But I'll leave it at the fact that they seem to be starting to alert themselves to the one critical thing that has defined Argentinian inflation for the past 20 years: Bullshit figures from the government saying the currency is stabilized, at the same time as the government takes obvious punitive measures to curb inflation. This leads to distrust which leads to the demolition of the currency.
Argentines can take a 20% drop in the Peso with a morning medialuna. Americans have no fucking idea what's going on. Americans have barely begun to put together the networks to measure it - and is evidenced by Costco taking advantage here, Americans have absolutely no peer-to-peer ways of negotiating the value of a dollar against value anymore. That's quite a dangerous situation, because it means prices are psychologically still thought of as an "act of God" as opposed to any true understanding of who is outpacing whom.
Like I said, inflation and hyperinflation especially are a steep learning curve.
If I were living in BsAs, I'd begin looking for something else to put under the floorboards besides USD. And voting for that clown who wants to tie ARS to USD as if it was 1983 is probably like trying to get tickets to the Titanic right before it sinks. You can do better than resurrecting Menem's economy. (Then again, the Fernandez are even bigger clowns, which is why I refuse to engage in anyone's politics in Argentina).