Why the label is the specimen
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Everything else in this craft is recoverable. A specimen can be cleaned again, trimmed again, repaired, rehoused, photographed and re-priced. Its locality data cannot be recreated once it is gone.
The cheapest thing and the only irreversible one
Writing down where a specimen came from takes ten seconds in the field and costs nothing.
Not writing it down converts the specimen permanently into a rock. No amount of later expertise restores it, because the information was never in the stone.
That asymmetry is the whole reason this section exists and it is the thing beginners discover two years late, holding a drawer of nice material they cannot describe.
What the data is doing
It makes the specimen identifiable. Many species look alike; locality narrows the field faster than any test.
It makes it comparable. A collector or a curator wants specimens from a known place so they can be set against others from the same place.
It makes it salable. Two visually identical specimens, one labeled to a named mine and one labeled "Arizona", are not the same product and do not fetch the same price.
It makes it scientific. A specimen with a precise locality can be studied. Without one it is decorative, whatever its quality.
The arithmetic of losing it
Undocumented material sells, and it sells as decor rather than as specimens. The gap between the two is large and it is not a grading gap: it is a data gap.
Dealers price this openly. Material offered with no locality is discounted precisely because the buyer cannot resell it as anything more specific than what it looks like.
Where labels actually get lost
In the field, when material goes into one bucket from two spots.
In transit, when newspaper wrapping and a loose slip part company.
At the cleaning sink, which is a common place, because the label goes somewhere dry and the specimen goes somewhere wet and they are reunited by memory.
And years later, when pyrite decay or acid vapor destroys the paper while leaving the stone.
All four are procedural rather than technical, which means all four are solved by a habit rather than by equipment.