fitst check with your broker and see if they allow delivery. IB does not. The only one I know about is comex. The minis I think are just a certificate since it's not a full bar. Same with comex, broker holds a certificate in your name and they deduct storage from your account. In the old days, you could hire Brinks to deliver it from the comex wharehouse to wherever you wanted it. You need to have cash in your account on delivery day. For all that trouble you are better off just buying the ETF GLD. It's bullion stored and with no work. Taking deliveyr is just a bunch of papers, and you never actually even see your gold. If you really want to, you personally can take delivery at the wharehouse, but what are you going to do with it? Then it has to be assayed before you can sell it. After all that it aint much of a hedge against the dollar. You'll have a bar of gold and no dollars left.
there are companies that specialize in physical and that is a much better way to go than futures if you want to own physical. For instance, when Warren Buffet bought silver, he flew in his private jet to London and signed the papers and there his silver sits in the vault.
to reiterate, the proper way to do it is use the futures market to lock in your price, then take your cash to the dealer and once the physical is purchased close out the futures position.
Its done with some regularity but the smaller the size the more of a pain it is. Find a broker that does not object to you taking delivery. Then, on delivery day, you will be issued a COMEX warehouse receipt. You will pay to store it but if you want to pick it up immediatel or at any later date you can as long as you comply strictly with COMEX procedures for pick up. Some months back the University of Texas pickup up about a billion dollars of gold and flew it to Texas.
I don't know where you got your information but I can tell you that you are inaccurate on many aspects. GLD is not limited to physical gold, it's actually mostly futures contracts before anything else. You cannot redeem GLD for real gold, there is only one ETF (technically trust) where you can redeem the shares for real gold and that's the Eric Sprott product. Mints, jewelers, some industrials and even some investors do take actual physical delivery and it is not as bureaucratic as you make it seem. You do actually take the gold, you can have it delivered to your home if you wish, by Brinks, for a fee. There is no need to assay the bars as there is a specific criteria onto which bars are accepted with which mint marks. Of course, there is a trust issue with CME but that's another story.
GLD trades futures but is backed up by bullion. Try to buy at the CME and then sell to your local jeweler and see after the spread if you have any dollars left. OK, if you say so, take delivery from comex, and I don't care how many mint marks it has on it, and try to sell it and see if they don't charge you to have it assayed.
I don't know why you goldbugs even care. You aint gonna be happy until you can buy a case of beer with an ounce of gold, and that's all it will buy and that's all that will be for sale when gold becomes a currency.