When the dust settled on Wall Street’s plunge last week, only one stock on the S&P 500 was left having actually gained value: Campbell Soup.

Investors clearly had visions of soup lines dancing in their heads. And that made me wonder: What are some local businesses that are thriving despite all the doom and gloom?

I started by visiting Alan Anderson of Columbia Coin & Stamp. Anderson has been in the business for 28 years and said he has never seen such a bull market for bullion. The price of gold has more than tripled since 1999, and buyers at his shop now outnumber sellers 10-to-1.

"I think they have no faith anymore in traditional investments," Anderson said, sitting behind the counter at his modest shop on Bernadette Drive. "Look what the stock market is doing. They’ve seen real estate crash. They see that they don’t get any interest on their CDs to make it worthwhile, so they’re looking for alternative investments, and that’s when gold and silver rise to the top."

All Anderson had on hand that day were 4 measly ounces of silver and a paltry ¼-ounce of gold. Metal, he said, was flying out his doors as fast as he could get his hands on it. He sold 16 ounces of gold last week, valued at about $14,000, in the blink of an eye. This week he placed new orders for much-coveted South African Kruggerand and Canadian Maple Leaf coins but was told the backlog is four to six weeks because of record demand. Still, he swallowed hard and ordered the coins at prices he considers obscene.

"I was reluctant to play the game at these levels, but people keep pushing. What can you do?" said Anderson, 72, a no-nonsense Nebraskan. "I’ve never seen premiums this high. ... We’re all buyers right now, and it’s not anything that you quibble about. You just buy it."

While I was sitting with him, the phone rang three times with callers asking for gold. The last was a woman who asked to buy one-tenth of an ounce with the 80-some dollars she had scraped together. Anderson shook his head. Gold, he said, used to be the sole purview of the "big guys." These days, everybody wants in.

"You can see people’s instability out there," he said after hanging up the phone. "They don’t know what to do."

Later I walked past what looked like another booming business. In about a 10-minute period outside the doors of Plasma Biological Services Inc. on Walnut Street, I counted a dozen people - almost all of them men - walk inside to make donations.

I flagged down a prospective donor, Aaron Hughes, 31, of Columbia, and asked what the fuss was about. He said he waits tables at night but began donating plasma about a year ago when his tips slowed down. Now he donates five or six times a month and counts on the extra cash to pay for rent and fuel.

"Is it healthy to donate that much?" I asked, cringing.

"I feel OK," Hughes said. "I eat healthy, drink lots of water. They tell you water is really important."

The process, he said, involves drawing blood from the arm, filtering it through a machine to extract plasma and pumping the remaining red and white blood cells back into the body. The plasma is used for research or to aid hemophiliacs. It takes a little over an hour to donate, and donors are paid a cool $25. The lab, said Hughes, offers an extra $5 to donors on their fifth and 10th donations each month.

Hughes had a thriller novel under his arm to pass the time, but before entering the plasma center, he shared an economic remedy.

"The best thing for this country to do is get the fair tax passed," he said, referring to a national sales tax that would replace all income taxes. "That will increase the economy because it will knock out all the hidden taxes from the IRS, which means people get back higher returns. … But the Internal Revenue Service is trying to fight it because it will put them out of business."

Later in the week, I got an e-mail telling me about a brand new start-up business in town, Hawthorn Recovery Services. Bonnie Baker just opened the doors on her Campusview Drive office and employs five people. Her business, she said, is the "recovery of delinquent accounts," and business is booming.

"It’s not a good time in the economy," she began. "I’ve talked to a lot of businesses, and their receivables are climbing, which means they’re struggling to focus on their core business right now."

Baker has worked in the industry more than 20 years at a large collection agency in town but said she finally thought the climate was right to head out on her own. Baker said business opportunities from companies such as home decorators, contractors and hospitals abound in Columbia. Things only promise to get better as tax season approaches and companies need to get old accounts off their books.

"You have to be willing to be flexible and give them more options these days," Baker said, noting that longer-term payment plans and settlements are becoming the rule rather than the exception for debtors. "We see ourselves as counselors," she said. "People get themselves into trouble, and they don’t know what to do. It’s an avoidance thing, and we let them know there are alternatives."

However, Baker said, she reserves the right to track people’s whereabouts through online records and to call up friends and family members to find debtors. Debt collectors nationwide, she noted, returned a record $40 billion to companies last year, and the industry has more than doubled in recent years as people put more and more purchases on credit cards.

These are just a few of the new business opportunities out there in Boone County, where unemployment has already doubled this decade. I tell you, American innovation up close and personal is a wonderful thing to behold, and in this economic contraction, we’re going to need every bit of it.

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