To catch a thief — or several

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We have surveillance cameras at our Maui pawn shop, but we DO NOT do what Portland pawnbroker Mike Fink does:

Fink, who owns Guitar Grave, has been posting YouTube videos of customers who are trying to sell stolen items or have stolen from him.

Read more: http://www.wmtw.com/news/pawn-shop-owners-videos-help-police-fight-crime/24353626#ixzz2t8hddQU8

He does more than that. He posts videos from his shop about anything that strikes him as funny, and he is a humorous man. Some are what you might expect — stoners; but others are just Portlandians who seem to hear a different, more uncertain trumpet. You can watch a bunch of them by going here.

Portland Press-Herald photo

Portland Press-Herald photo

Fink also marries people. This is not that unusual. A number of pawnshops (but not Kamaaina Loan) will tie your knot. We have not watched all his  videos yet,  but our favorite so far is “A Very Guitar Grave Wedding.” The bride, Nikki Rae, who seems to be having a very good time, says, a few minutes after Fink ties the knot, “I want to be on top.”

For some reason a local radio reporter walked in during the ceremony and recorded it. It must have made for curious radio. He ended up being the witness for the marriage, too.

Guitar Grave is not the most obvious name for a pawnshop, but there’s a story behind that, too.

Fink says he started out selling games and was looking for a name. Marketing advice said to find something alliterative, so he started searching the database of available names for Game G-something.

Among the choices was Grave, and he picked that because it was the only one that his son, who was then 7, could spell.

Later, an employee persuaded him to expand into collectible guitars, and Guitar Grave was born.

Really, Kamaaina Loan (Hawaiian for “child of the land,” meaning native-born or, loosely, old-timer) seems pallid by comparison.  And nobody but a kamaaina can spell it.

 

 

The ‘lumpy incomes’ of the rich

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the last egg

the last egg

A little late — and a lot more illiterate than the predecessors — Barron’s comes to note the arrival of Suttons & Robertsons pawn shop for the rich in Manhattan. Kamaaina Loan blog has already noted the incursion of the newcomer a month ago based on reports in the New York Times and other publications.

In some ways, the Barron’s report is better. It points out that while S&R can claim to have been in business for 250 years, it is really a new enterprise, having been taken over by a much younger, bigger firm with dreams of globalizing a local brand, sort of like what happened to Krispy Kreme donuts, although no doubt DFC Global hopes not to repeat that fiasco.

We like DFC chief Jeffrey Weiss’s characterization of his target customers as people with “lumpy incomes” and intend to steal that. Most of our customers are rather less rich than his but the conundrum of lumpy incomes is just as pressing. On Maui, with the visitor industry pulsing through peaks and bottoms and sides and saddles, lots of working people find  that — just like investment bankers waiting for the year-end bonus — the bills arrive before the money does.

Another interesting factoid — of no obvious relevance to us in Maui, though — is that while the uber-rich keep about 9.5% of their richness in tangible things (Aston-Martins, spare houses), that rises to 18% in places like the United Arab Emirates, Saudi Arabia and China. It helps to have a handkerchief full of jewels you can stuff in your pocket when fleeing the revolution.

Pawnbrokers and second-hand dealers made a good thing out of the Russian Revolution, as the exiled aristocrats unloaded their Faberge eggs, jewel-encrusted ikons and silver-gilt tea services in Paris, London and New York. A La Vieille Russie (To Old Russia) moved from Kiev to Paris about 1920 and opened a branch in New York in 1934.

It’s still there, across the street from the Plaza, and as late as about 1970, you could still buy the sweat of Russian serfs, once removed; although after three generations the plunder of the oppressed had finally been processed through the digestive organs of the capitalist snake, and the last time we were at A La Vieille Russie, it was reduced to selling reproductions of Georgian furniture and there wasn’t an ikon in the joint. (There are some rather pitiful-looking ikons, no jewels, in their online store at www.alvr.com; but the goose that laid the Faberge eggs is just about dead.)

The article is in Barron’s “Pentadaily,” which is described as “Insights and advice for families with assets of $5 million or more.” It’s a shame Pentadaily cannot afford any copy editors.

We are considering adopting a slogan for the Kamaaina Loan blog. Maybe:

“Insights and advice for families with assets of hard work, lots of children and an Hawaiian heirloom bracelet or two.”

 

Pawnbroker heads for paradise

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From the headline

West coast pawnshop owner moving to Paradise

we thought we were going to get some more competition for our Maui pawn shop. But no. Newfoundlander Rod Lyver is just moving across the island to a town called Paradise. But it’s still in Newfoundland, where it’s cold!

Kidding aside, Rod’s story is inspiring, how a kid struck a deal with a local merchant to take over some unsold stuff, turned a slight ($32) profit and took off from there to create a successful small business.

Attaboy, Rod!

 

 

 

 

Snakes

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We like to say you should check into our Maui pawn shop frequently, because you never know what you will find. Neither, of course, do we, until we have it.

Like this snake deity:

snakes

Redeeming a pawn the hard way

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So last week, we noticed a story from Nampa, Idaho, about police catching a burglar cutting through the roof of a local pawn shop. Nothing that unusual.

But now we find that he was a carefully focused burglar.  According to Kotaku website, he just wanted his Xbox back. If he didn’t have the money to redeem it, he could always have extended the loan, which no doubt would have been cheaper than what he’s going to pay now.

Why he was armed with an AR-15 is yet unexplained.

 

Lots and lots of gold

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Here at Kamaaina Loan And Cash For Gold, we buy and sell gold every day. A typical deal might involve 20 or 30 grams of 14K gold. Sometimes more, but always gram by gram.

Thus we were impressed in reading this Bloomberg News story about a guy who

 used his connections in Iran and Turkey to move almost a metric ton of gold to Iran every day for 1 1/2 years.

Bloomberg didn’t say whether those were long or short tons, but either way that’s a lot of gold. There are 28 grams in an ounce, so that’s around 900,000 grams a day. Multiply that by 1.4, since the gold we take in averages around 60% fineness, and you get around 1,250,000 grams equivalent of jeweler’s gold.

We’d have to do 250,000 deals (at 50 grams a deal) to equal one day of Riza Sharraf’s gold trade.

Riaz Sharraf, via Bloomberg News

Riaz Sharraf, via Bloomberg News

Not that we envy Mr. Sharraf, who now resides in a small cell in a Turkish prison. It started when fog made an airplane full of his gold land at an alternate airport where the customs officials asked questions and seized the gold for non-declaration.

Except, get this. Maybe it wasn’t gold.

Sara Turizm, for its part, claimed that Omanye had sold it fake gold. It provided to the Ghana courts in June an analysis of the gold done by Emirates Industrial Laboratory LLC. The “gold” was 99 percent lead for the base, brushed with a patina of 96 percent nickel.

Sarraf’s lawyer says, “My client is innocent. I look forward to proving that in court.”

An interesting legal point. Is it a crime to smuggle lead?

All of this is fascinating but has nothing to do with pawn, except we deal in gold at our Maui pawn shop and Riza Sharraf dealt in gold in Turkey and Iran — or something. If you are a fan of mysteries with surprise twists and turns, you will like the story of Riza Sharraf.

Being ‘female friendly’

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We have been in pawn shops that do look kind of like a man cave, but we think this story in the Tampa Tribune overstates the novelty of Lauren Myhre’s “female friendly” She Money shop.

Most pawn shops, including our Maui pawn shop, have something like a 50-50 split of men and women customers, if not an absolute majority of women. After all, most pawn customers are working people, and women are in the work force in equal numbers with men.

Still, it couldn’t hurt to cater to half your audience, and Myhre has gone extra steps:

Like most any pawn shop, She Money takes gold, silver and diamond jewelry, but the store accepts high-end costume jewelry, too. Most women don’t have the tools and other items that are staples of the typical pawn shop, but Myhre saw the genuine value in other items they do possess.

“Women don’t always have jewelry to pawn or sell,” Myhre said. “I take a lot of crystal, such as Waterford or Tiffany crystal, as well as designer handbags and sunglasses, figurines, hand-carved wooden pieces, art, sterling silver, pieces of fine furniture, high-end lamps, musical instruments and even high-end cars.”

 

At Kamaaina Loan, we take most of those things, too, without specially considering ourselves “female friendly.”  Cars are an exception as Hawaii law restricts that, but our retail store has sun glasses, art, designer handbags. Not many lamps, perhaps.

A lot of what any pawn shop accepts as collateral (or will purchase) is unisex. Game systems are an obvious example. We probably get as many Xboxes and Playstations from women as from men, and, in fact, a lot from moms accompanied by their children.

 

Want to visit ‘Pawn Stars’?

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Get in line. This tip from Examiner.com says 4,000 people a day go through the famous Gold and Silver Pawn Shop in Las Vegas.

Pro: It’s free.

Con: There is usually a line.

Helpful hint: There’s a 24-hour drive-through window.

Seth Gold on pawnbroking and teevee

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Hard Core Pawn’s Seth Gold gave an interview to the National Pawnbrokers Association in which he talks about how he was headed for a career in medicine, in part because he had picked up the negative attitudes toward pawnbroking that were — and still are — so common, even growing up in a pawnbroking family.

But he got — sidetracked hardly seems the right word — back on the family track and ended up in the family business anyway.

Seth Gold at work

Seth Gold at work

He praises the effect of the show on himself and on the pawn  business in general:

Another source of pride for me that stems from our roles as pawnbroking personalities is that visiting a pawn store is now cool. There are so many negative stereotypes surrounding the industry that have been dispelled thanks to reality shows such as ours. When people see our store on television every week, they are not only entertained, but also become open and aware to situations where they themselves might choose to visit their local pawn store.

Hard Core Pawn is an unreal reality show in one sense, at least. The Golds are well-known in the pawn business, and are really sweethearts. All that drama on the screen; that’s Hollywood.

(We are Kamaaina Loan are aware our local readers may not be familiar with Hard Core Pawn, unless they get it via satellite or internet, as Oceanic doesn’t favor it. But the show has the Golds arguing amongst themselves all the time. That’s scripted for them. In real life they get along.)

More teevee pawn

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Why not us?

As you may know, Kamaaina Loan shot some trial scenes for a pawn shop reality show. You may even have helped us by bringing in your strange items. While not entirely dead, that one hasn’t been picked up by a producer yet.

Yet another pawn reality show debuted over the holidays, called Game of Pawns, shot in Branson, Missouri.

What caught our attention was not the new wrinkle — it’s a combination of a pawn reality show and a game show —  but its location in a tourist mecca.

With the notable exception of Hard Core Pawn set in Detroit, it seems most of the leading pawn reality shows are in tourist towns — Las Vegas, Beverly Hills, now Branson. What more touristy place to have another than Maui?

We’re ready for our screen test, Mr. DeMille.

On the other hand, according to this other story about the big dog among pawn shows, Pawn Stars, being a pawn star brings with it its own problems:

“Their life has completely changed because of this show,” Mason said. “They used to be just guys working in a pawn shop – now they’re celebrities.”

Now, when they’re taping the show, they have restrictions on who can come in, because they’d never be able to get anything done otherwise. But the extras you see in the background are picked out of the actual crowd.

So if you go, you could be in the background on the show, but they’ll make you sign a waiver and instruct you not to walk around staring into the camera.