Boca Raton – long a bastion for moneyed, elbow-patch-wearing New Yorkers who winter on the Florida coast – has taken the curtain off the United States’ first gold-dispensing ATM. The “Gold to Go ATM” was officially unveiled yesterday in an opening ceremony at the Town Center Mall in Boca Raton at 10 a.m. EST.
“Boca is for the rich and famous,” Glen Calder, a PR rep for PMX Gold, the Boca Raton company that will operate the machines, told the Palm Beach Post. “The Town Center Mall is where a lot of people go to spend a lot of money. It’s a good fit.”
Feed the ATM cash or a credit card and you can get gold bullion bars or gold bullion coins in return. Prices on the gold are updated every 90 seconds to ensure the company doesn’t lose money against current spot prices on the yellow metal. Shares of the parent company for PMX Gold, PMX Communities, Inc. (OTC:PMXO), shot up 30 percent on yesterday’s news, and it sounds like this ATM could be the first of many in South Florida.
“PMXO previously entered into a preliminary agreement for the purpose of developing proposals for licensing and franchise agreements for German engineered, unmanned point-of-sale technology and to conduct exclusive test marketing in the State of Florida,” said Michael Hiler, the Company’s President and CEO, in a press release. “Since that time, we have secured prime, high traffic retail mall space, obtained legal advice regarding exemption from Florida state sales tax issues, acquired newly minted Credit Suisse .9999+ pure gold bars and developed the initial infrastructure to commence retail Gold Bullion sales. Upon satisfaction of final equipment testing and security details, we plan to start operations.”
Despite its boring name, the Town Center Mall seems like a good place to test out gold ATMs. It plays host to just about every opulent store you could expect to find in Beverly Hills or South Beach: Cartier, Bvlgari, Tiffany & Co., Burberry, Armani Exchange, Neiman Marcus, Coach, LaCoste, Louis Vuitton, etc., and – perhaps more importantly – it doesn’t cater to the type of clientele that might try toss the ATM in the back of their pick-up trucks. No word yet on whether or not silver ATMs are in the pipeline.
