According to Fox News, “Pawn Stars” dumped Oliva Black because she was formerly a model at the Suicide Girls nude website.
Apparently, she still works at the pawn shop.
We are pretty sure Big Rich has never modeled for Suicide Girls.
When we auditioned for a reality TV show for Kamaaina Loan, we asked the
staff to sign model releases, but nude modeling was not on our minds.
Our friend Rick Harrison, the star of “Pawn Stars,” has a book out, called “License to Pawn.” Can the Rick Harrison bobblehead doll be far behind?
If you follow the link you’ll come to an 8-minute interview with Rick plugging his book. But he also is given a chance to debunk some of the myths and legends about pawn shops and pawn brokers.
One is that pawn shops prey on desperate gamblers in Las Vegas who have tapped out. Harrison says 90% of his customers redeem their pawns in good times, and even now, when times are far from good in Vegas, 80% do.
That matches Kamaaina Loan’s experience, and also tracks surveys of pawn shops across the country.
Most people use pawn shops like people with bank accounts use banks — to move money in and out according to their need for cash from day to day. But because up to 25% of Americans do not have a bank account, “alternative lenders” like pawn shops are how they do it.
Do you find it hard to believe that one American in 4 does not have a bank account? Survey after survey finds this to be a fact, and it has not varied a whole lot over at least the past 40 years.
Another point Harrison makes is that he has 22,000 items in his warehouse, all one-of-a-kind. It makes for inventory-taking nightmares. But for customers, the lesson is, if you see a bargain at a pawn shop, grab it.
Via our friends at Jaxpawn, a story
A lonely place to meet a stranger
about a Craigslist encounter that went horribly, fatally wrong.
We worry about people who agree to sell gold through Craigslist. And this story — although it involved an ATV, not gold — is why. Inviting strangers to your house to buy your gold; or agreeing to meet a stranger in a remote place displays a trust in human nature that is not really justified.
Better, we think, to sell your gold jewelry at an established store where security measures are in place.
Besides, you’ll get just as good a deal, or better, from any pawnshop.
According to this article in China Daily Europe
, pawn shops are modernizing in China. In China, you can pawn wine. That’s something American pawnbrokers haven’t gotten into.
What the article does not say is that Chinese banks are very dubious affairs. No wonder small businesses prefer the direct and simple convenience of dealing in pawn — especially when Chinese pawnbrokers will lend on real estate, cars and other goods that most American pawnbrokers would not consider.
One example from the story:
Wang Qinghong, the owner of a small company based in Tianjin that makes drinking straws, is a typical customer. Last month a supplier pushed forward the date of a down payment and Wang had to raise all the money within two days.
“At first the bank was the only lender I could think of, but it would have taken at least a week to get a loan from the bank,” Wang says.
The pawnshop, by contrast, was able to give him money in a few minutes after having verified that he owned a flat
Lots of people are posting fond memories of Jose Krall, the baker and pastry cook at Maui Bake Shop & Deli, who is missing since his plane crashed Saturday. Here is our favorite.
Jose’s productions were first-rate and priced accordingly. A strawberry dressed up in a tuxedo made of dark and white chocolate, for example, cost about $3. The exception was his baguettes, the bread that is the staff of life for the French.
When a sort of imitation baguette was available at local supermarkets for $3 or so, a genuine, crusty, hard baguette from Jose cost just $1.25. I once asked him why his baguettes were so cheap when his other loaves were priced around $6. I cannot recall his exact words, but the gist was:
“Everyone should be able to afford to eat good bread.”
In his old shop, before his brief retirement, he had a poster that read, in French, “In his (the baker’s) hands, the essence of good bread.” Jose Krall was a master baker who took his craft seriously. He walked the walk.
Jose Krall, picture from The Maui News
Perhaps you have seen one of Kamaaina Loan’s ads that offers
to buy diamonds, “especially wanted, 1 carat and higher.”
However, as an episode a few days ago reveals, not all big stones
are good stones.
A customer wanted a loan on a whopper of a diamond, 3 carats.
But, in the words of Jimi, the broker who examined it, the stone
was, in technical jargon, “one level above frozen spit.”
Diamonds are valued according to size, color, clarity and cut.
This particular diamond was very poor in the clarity department,
with several inclusions and flaws that cut down on its sparkle.
Its maximum loan value was only a couple hundred bucks, very
low for such a big stone.
Diamonds are examined with a 10-power loupe.
Cut also matters. The standard or round brilliant cut has been
determined both mathematically and by experience to produce
the most sparkle and glitter. But not every stone is suited to
the standard treatment.
As an example, a couple weeks ago we were shown a largish
stone with a weird cut, not quite exactly like any of the usual
categories, such as emerald, rose etc.
What would induce a cutter to choose such a method?
We couldn’t ask the cutter, but it may have been that given
the flaws in the stone, the bizarre cut was judged the best way
to get the most fire and light out of the stone.
Kevin recalled an example some years ago (not at Kamaaina ‘
Loan), where a customer had a cracked 2-carat stone. (Yes,
diamonds, hard as they are, can crack and chip.) Another
jeweler had recommended tossing out the stone, but Kevin
suggested sending it out to be recut.
It worked. The cutter managed to rescue one and a half carats
of good stone from the wreck.
Sometimes, it seems, the true skill of a good cutter is better
displayed on a poor stone than on a good one.
In any event, with diamonds size matters but not more than ‘
color, cut or clarity.
According to The Maui News. the county is issuing a request for trash-to-power proposals in order to divert a lot of opala from the Central Maui Landfill.
It will be interesting to see who applies and what technologies are offered. The county put on an all-day seminar 20-some years ago when trashpower was a hot item, but the then-director of public works preferred to bury garbage. That got expensive in the ’90s when EPA began requiring environmental safeguards on dumps.
Oahu went ahead with H-POWER, against a lot of skeptics, but it seems to have been successful enough. At least, Honolulu is expanding it in a big way.
A question for Maui will be, do we generate enough trash? When plastic recycling was attempted, there just wasn’t enough plastic garbage.
By definition, garbage has low unit value, so you need a lot of it in order to make money, or to justify the considerable overhead of a biggish power plant. Unlike wind or solar, though, trash is firm power, available anytime.
Trash can have unusual properties. In Virginia Beach, Virginia, which is a flat as the back of your hand, the city piled up trash several hundred feet, covered it with dirt and grass and turned it into a park, called Mount Trashmore. (The city officials didn’t like that but the name stuck.)
Once they had a hill a couple hundred feet high, the city could finally have a Soapbox Derby competition. Before, it was too flat for the cars to roll.
At Kamaaina Loan, we are always interested in gold —
buying it, selling it, lending money on it. But not in
predicting where the price is going.
Not everybody is so cautious. Consider this quote from
the financial advice service Seeking Alpha:
the reality is that President Obama is good for precious metal prices.
We’re not saying he is or he isn’t, but that’s short
and easy to remember. Remember that gold
was around $1720 an ounce on Election Day, but
it had varied by $75 up and down over the past
30 days. It’s about $1729 as this is posted.
Let’s see where it goes from here. Meanwhile,
if you need cash, we have it and will exchange
it for gold at the going rate.
Read the whole article at: http://seekingalpha.com/article/1003041-2012-election-president-obama-and-precious-metals
Is this the future of gold prices?
Here’s a story that every pawn shop operator can give
personal testimony about.
A man brought us a book to see what it was worth.
It was volume 2 of a 2-volume edition of one of
Charles Darwin’s books. Ordinarily, volume 2 is
worth more than volume 1, because 2’s tend to get lost
more often. In this case, however, and on Maui, the
book was virtually worthless.
That’s because a complete set, in excellent condition,
can be had on the Internet for about $50. Given
shipping costs from Maui, and considering how
unlikely it would be to find a volume 1 here; and that
it’s a heavy book, it would cost more to marry volume 2
up with a volume 1 on the Mainland than it’s worth.
However, while the owner was talking about where he
got the book, our assistant was flipping pages. “It’s
worth at least $20,” he told the owner.
Because someone had stuck a $20 Silver Certificate
between the pages.
At last August’s pawnbrokers’ convention, a Mainland
broker told about how a good customer whose husband
had died brought him a fancy hunting knife, hoping
she could get $300 to pay bills.
“I looked under the cotton in the knife box and there
were four one-hundred dollar bills.”
The other day, a customer came in with a problem that could have easily been avoided with a little forethought.
She had four pawn loans outstanding, each one a mixture of gold jewelry (chains, earrings, rings etc.). Each loan was for over a thousand dollar. That made her a big customer, since the average pawn loan – both at Kamaaina Loan and nationwide – is under $100. (Sometimes way under. While the woman was working out her problem, a man came in and took out a pawn loan for $3.)
Her loans were not only a miscellany of objects. She had mixed items of sentimental value – “things I treasure,” she described them – with common jewelry of no special significance.
As sometimes happens, the customer did not have enough money to redeem all her pawns, or even to redeem one and extend the other three (which would have required less money now). She was faced with losing at least one bag of jewelry.
She could have stood that, she said, if she could have let the common stuff go and kept the treasures. Her problem was, the treasures were mixed in with the ordinary.
If she had had some extra cash, a resolution would have been simple: She could have redeemed one, taken out the treasure, then pawned the rest back for cash to repeat the sequence with the next.
She wanted to go into each bag and pull out the treasures, compensating us for that value. Unfortunately, the pawn contract doesn’t allow that.
It has to be closed out and returned to the customer, who can then re-pawn if she wants.
The simple precaution, if you are presenting both treasures and common goods, is to have the treasures written up as separate pawns. Then, if your expectations of being able to redeem don’t quite pan out, you can redeem the treasures and let the rest go.
Monday – Friday 9 am – 6 pm
Saturday – Sunday 10 am – 4 pm
