Nov. 30--With three children and a mother's desire to give them the perfect Christmas, Dionne Smith might have joined the post-Thanksgiving rush to the stores this weekend. Instead, the Woodlawn resident headed in exactly the opposite direction -- to a place that was quiet rather than frenzied, where she would sell rather than spend.

She arrived with a little Ziploc-type bag of gold jewelry; she left with $75.

"It's going to go in the bank," Smith declared.

It was the only kind of Black Friday that made sense to some this year, when the traditional opening day of the holiday shopping season coincided with an economy that continues to falter. Smith was among those who bypassed the malls in favor of, in her case, the Hilton Pikesville, where Get Gold Cash was paying cold hard cash for jewelry.

At a time when stock prices are plummeting and the housing and credit markets are frozen, gold suddenly seems like one of the few tangible assets left.

"Gold never disappears," Craig R. Nusinov, the company's president, said. "It's always worth something in the market."

There's something so basic, so elemental about unloading something so personal -- rings and necklaces, bangles and bracelets -- not as jewelry but as metal. Just about everything Nusinov and his staff buys, unless it's a Rolex watch or a unique piece of jewelry, will be melted down for the gold.

Nusinov, whose family has been in the jewelry business in the Baltimore area for several generations, has seen people offer up "everything you can imagine" at this point.

"We buy a lot of teeth -- caps, crowns, bridges -- as long as it's gold," he said. "Surprisingly, a tooth could bring in $50."

In a bare-bones meeting room of the hotel, one of three locations where GGC set up shop this weekend, a trickle of people came in to see what they could get for the mostly unused or broken jewelry that they had dug up from back drawers and forgotten boxes in their homes.

It was a glimpse into the mind-set of these disquieting times, as telling as those monthly consumer-confidence figures. It wasn't as desperate as you might imagine -- no one tearfully pulled off a wedding ring to make this month's rent -- and yet the sense of needing to make rather than spend money, to unload rather than to acquire, was palpable.

Still, there was a certain festivity, as people walked out with smiles and some crisp bills.

"It was all in this teeny tiny box," Juanita Logan, a retired federal worker from York, Pa., marveled of the old jewelry that netted her $145.