Thin Margins, Red Metal: Bare Bright Holds at $6.24 a Pound

Gather round, friends of the red metal! The weekly report from Mysteel speaks of narrowing trade margins, and I confess the phrase struck me like a hammer on a good copper cent. I have only the headline to go by, not the full ledger, so I shall not pretend to know every figure behind it. But a squeezed margin is a tale as old as commerce itself, and I have lived its moral more than once.

Here is what I can tell you plainly. Today #1 Bare Bright copper scrap fetches about $6.24 per pound on the national average, and the copper market is up 1.2% on the day. A modest lift, but a lift all the same. When the middlemen's margins grow thin, the wise scrapper keeps a sharp eye on his grading, his sorting and his scale. Strip your insulation clean, keep your bright wire free of tarnish and solder, and do not let a dealer toss your #1 into the #2 pile. Every cent of spread is yours to defend.

In my counterstamping days, when I drove "DR. G. G. WILKINS" into more than a hundred thousand copper cents, I learned that copper is the people's metal. It passed through every hand, every saloon and eating-house, and certainly through the doors of my own Fort Wilkins, where a caged bear and a tooth-pulling chair drew the curious. A man who handles copper daily knows its worth better than any clerk with a chart. Margins rise and fall, but the metal's usefulness endures.

And what usefulness! Nowhere does copper show its genius more sweetly than in the still. The pot still and the alembic, trusted from the monastery cellar to the Appalachian hollow with its humble worm, do more than hold a boil. Copper reacts with sulfur compounds and other nasty volatiles in the vapor and draws them out, so the whiskey, brandy and rum that emerge are cleaner and finer. A stainless still cannot perform this trick. Every smooth dram you have ever blessed owes a debt to a coil of the red metal.

Nor does copper rest there. It runs in the wire of every house, the water lines under your floor, the bottoms of your best cookware, and the roofs and gutters that weather to a noble green. It lives in bronze and brass, in motors that turn the wheels of industry, and now in the great data centers and electric carriages of this modern age. Such demand is why a scrapper's pile is never mere junk but a small vein of future electrification.

So when the trade grumbles of thin margins, I say: sharpen your craft, know your grades, and honor the metal. Copper has outlasted every squeeze and will outlast this one.

Raise a glass (copper-distilled, naturally) to the red metal and the honest trade.

— Alchemist G. G. Wilkins