If that’s a 4-foot-long catfish, we must be in Indiana

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An Indiana pawn shop has started a reality TV show about itself for local cablevision.

Early submissions were a large stuffed catfish and a phony check not written, as claimed, by George Washington. Sounds interesting.

In case you’re wondering about the reality pawn show that Kamaaina Loan auditioned for in October, things are progressing. The “sizzle” (TV lingo for a short sampler used to try to interest producers in watching a longer pilot show) has been turned down by several networks but not all. Several appointments are scheduled in the next few weeks to keep hunting for a home.

We had a great time meeting folks who brought their unusual treasures to us for our sizzle to promote a Maui pawn reality show

No, no, no, not that kind of stuffed catfish

and are grateful no one asked us to place a value on a stuffed catfish ($450 in Indiana). A stuffed marlin we could have dealt with.

A more elevated view

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Funny thing how climbing the county building from the eighth to the ninth floor changes the view so much.

Mayor Alan Arakawa has an excellent summary in The Maui News about “Now is the time to fix the water system.” As this blog noted in February, we should welcome water rate increases, because the time to have begun fixing what ails the Department of Water Supply is not now but years and decades ago.

For all that time, the County Council wouldn’t raise rates to levels sufficient to maintain the system. And Mayor Alan Arakawa was no different from the rest of the council in that respect.

Now he has got religion, and a good thing, too. It also appears that at least some other members of the council are coming around to the understanding that the water system doesn’t repair itself.

Right now, I get all the water I can use delivered to my house for less than the cost of a can of soda each day, so even a doubling of water rates isn’t going to break the banks of any but the destitute.

It may help, too, that the department has moved to monthly billing. We’ll have to write twice as many checks but for half as much each, which should ease the sticker shock.

For a generation at least, Maui County has had the lowest water rates in the state. It is not something to be proud of.

 

 

 

Pawn 101: We buy (almost) anything

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So when a customer walked in with a box of old cannon balls and shells, Kamaaina Loan shelled out, so to speak.

Old ordnance has collectible value, but it takes an expert to identify the many varieties.

The collection we have is from the Civil War period and includes a Parrott shell (which was used in a cheap cannon that had a tendency to explode), some round shot and a mortar bomb filled with Minie balls (which are not balls but cylinders) rather than the usual round grapeshot.

As collectibles, cannon balls have the advantage of not needing gentle handling, unlike, say, Meissen china. On the other hand, shells, if filled with powder, can be dangerous. All ours are either solid cast iron or disarmed, so no worries.

In a pawn shop, you never know what will come through the door next.

 

Funny, we get along with the hair salons

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From the Des Moines Register, a story about a suburban enclave that denied a business application from a pawn shop, in part because the owner of a hair salon in the same strip mall said

“I think my clientele will be intimidated. A pawn shop is not curb appeal. That’s intimidation.”

Perhaps the people of Windsor Heights are unusually skittish. Kamaaina Loan has peacefully co-existed with Stephanie’s Hair Salon for over 35 years and with Lori’s Hair Shack for over 25 years.

If Mindy Schmitt only knew it, many of her stylists and many of her customers go to pawn shops. Kamaaina Loan’s customer base includes about 10% of the population of Maui, and this is not unusual.

The pawn shop owner announced he would appeal to the local district court (the Iowa equivalent of Hawaii’s circuit court). He will almost certainly win if he does.

 

Why we should welcome water rate increase

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Alan Arakawa has got religion when it  comes to water rates. When he was on the County Council, he, along with all the other members, thought it best to keep water rates as low as possible. So when the semi-autonomous Board of Water Suppply (as it then was) came in with requests, the council would take pride in holding rates down.

As a result, the water system deteriorated.

It’s a rule of thumb that businesses ought to spend about 3% of the value of their physical plant in maintenance each year. More if you’re an airline, maybe. The reasoning is that most things you own last about 30 years.

Cars don’t last that long, but water pipelines last 50 years or more before needing to be replaced.

So if your water system is worth around a billion dollars — which is a fair guess at the value of Maui’s public system — you should be spending $30 million, give or take, just on replacing and repairing your pipes, trucks, treatment plants, computer systems etc.

In recent years, the department has spent at that rate, or better, but for decades and decades, the entire operating budget hardly equaled 3% of the value of the plant. So there’s lots of catching up to do.

Whether the 5% rate increase the mayor called for in his State of the County message is the right amount is up for discussion, but at least the necessity for greater spending on maintenance is getting through to the ninth floor. It will be interesting to see whether the eighth floor gets it.

Seeing the man on the moon

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The inner Solar system (only terrestrial planets) as seen at 50 light years away from the Sun by the Colossus. The Sun to Mars distance will be seen at the angle of about 100 milliarcseconds. The sizes of the planets and the Sun on this image are not scaled with the distance.

Something big is up on Haleakala.

At Friday’s lecture at Maikalani, Jeff Kuhn, head of the Haleakala Observatory of the UH Institute for Astronomy, talked about The Colossus, which would be the world’s largest telescope. Kuhn modestly said he is only part of an international team,  but he’s the project leader.

In the past, every new largest telescope has been able to see more and more of the night sky. The Colossus would turn this approach on its head — it is designed not to see the Universe but to zero in on a single star.

The purpose would be to identify advanced civilizations. As Kuhn explained, as a civilization gets bigger, it acquires more data. Data requires energy to keep. Eventually, such a civilization would use up more than 1% of its star’s light. (Earth is at about 0.4% now.)

According to the laws of thermodynamics, using energy degrades it, changing light to heat. So to find one of these advanced civilizations, you need to see an extrasolar planet in its stars Earth-like “habitable zone” that is optically dim but bright in the infrared. Even the largest telescopes today cannot come near doing this, because they are too small and too general.

The Colossus would be a circle of 60 8-meter mirrors, arranged in a collector close to 250 feet across.

Its location, if built, is open. Hawaii and Chile would be the best sites.

Its cost would be a billion dollars, more or less. All private money. In fact, said Kuhn, for 150 years, each successive largest telescope (currently the Kecks on Mauna Kea) has been built with private money.

Although designed for a special purpose, the Colossus could do other things as well. It could see a man on the moon. A man your size — 2 meters.

How soon? Technically, Kuhn said, if the money is available, it could happen in 5 years. The 60 closest stars would have to be observed every night for several years to accumulate the tiny differences that would detect a planet that absorbs light and emits heat.

 

Been there, done that

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From the Gainesville Times.com, a story about a new ordinance that requires pawn shops to take a picture and fingerprint of customers pawning or selling items, and to make a daily electronic report to the local police.

“We have already begun seeing results that are a direct correlation to this ordinance,” police spokesman Cpl. Kevin Holbrook said.

 

The idea is to make it harder to fence stolen goods.

It’s not a new idea. In fact, Kamaaina Loan was the first pawn shop in the country to make electronic reporting available. For Kamaaina Loan, it was voluntary. Our custom software, pawnreport.com, has for more than 10 years provided Maui police a registry of every item we take in.

Unlike years ago, officers don’t have to come down in person with lists of stolen goods. They can survey our warehouse from their offices.

In Hawaii, pawn brokers and secondhand dealers are required by law to take fingerprints and copies of identification (usually a driver’s license) from sellers. It’s a law that is widely disregarded, especially by secondhand dealers.

They are not required to make electronic registries of purchases or pawns available to police.

You, the customer, should deal only with dealers who do demand ID and thumbprint.

Only the most ignorant of criminals try to fence stolen goods at our pawn shop. If their victim has filed a police report, and we have the goods, then we also have the name, address, photograph and fingerprint of the criminal.

Police love it when that happens. It makes their job so much easier.

SCOTT ROGERS/The Times
Pappy’s Pawn owner Gus Marroquin, right, helps Alejandro Serrano with the purchase of a smartphone at the Browns Bridge Road pawnshop.

 

Pawn 101: The most common bad news

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According to examiner.com, the most common bad news answer that the Pawn Stars stars give to customers is:

 “The customer’s ‘Sterling Silver’ flatware is actually plated.”

At Kamaaina Loan, the most common answer the customer doesn’t want to hear is probably, “Not for me.”

And it probably applies more to tools or electronic equipment than to flatware.

The deal is, it doesn’t make sense for a pawnbroker to lend money on (or purchase) anything that doesn’t have a ready resale value. “Ready” is a relative term. For collectibles and art, a ready market might take years to develop.

For power tools, which we see a lot of, a ready market means turnover in weeks, or at most a few months.

For electronic equipment, stuff that still works perfectly might not be worth a dime — games and game players from a couple of years ago usually have very small value in the market, if any. Older cellphones are another item that depreciates fast because newer models keep pushing them into the background.

The market is what it is. We don’t do much in the fur coat line, because who on Maui would we sell a fur coat to? On the Mainland, the coat might do better.

Plated silverware is usually (but not always) practically worthless, because the film of silver is so thin. Underneath is scrap iron, worth a penny a pound.

But you have to check. There are a few (very few in the case of plated eating utensils) models that have collectible value.

Which is why the No. 1 all-time response we give to customers who call is, “Bring it in.”

Until we see it and handle it and examine it, we cannot put a value on it.

We can tell you what silver is worth — $30.82 cents an ounce in New York as this is typed, but that’s for Comex-deliverable silver, which is a strange beast of great purity. Sterling is silver mixed with other metals (for durability), so it is worth less.

But a silver dollar — even if it is a Susan B. Anthony silver dollar without any silver in it — it always worth a dollar.

 

Keeping up with Chumlee

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The Las Vegas Review-Journal says Chumlee of “Pawn Stars” is giving up his lease at a toney mansion where, among others, Elvis’s manager Col. Tom Parker once lived.

No word where Chumlee is going, but the paper goes on to report that the popular pawn program has been extended 80 episodes (4 years), and that Chumlee gets $25K per, or a total of $2 mil.

Gossip site TMZ says Chumlee is a pretty good tipper: $2,000 on a $10,000 tab for champagne at a Mississippi saloon, along with his bodyguard.

Bodyguard? Fame is hell.

Pawnbrokers should be smiling

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IDEX Research finds that in 2012 for the first time, sales in America of jewelry and fine watches exceeded $70 billion. It is not clear from this story at National Jeweler whether resales were counted or not.

Our guess is not. But pawnbrokers should be happy anyway.

First, it gives more Americans more stuff to pawn if they feel like it. Second, it provides the wherewithal for pawn shops’ important business in recycled (second-hand, vintage, collectible, historical, retro) jewelry.

Bigger pie, bigger slices.

The percentage increase in the fine jewelry business was not as great as in 2011, but that year the prices of gold and other precious metals zoomed. In 2012, metals’ prices were up, but not as much, so the gain came from more sales.

That is, more Americans felt able to afford fine jewelry and watches last year. As our source for this story at Little Green Footballs notes, that should be taken as a vote of confidence in the overall economy.

In case you are curious, bling beats Bowser. Pets International says dog food sales are around $10 billion.