Sleepy time gal

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Kamaaina Loan’s live “sleeping beauty” was the hit of Wailuku First Friday. We weren’t sure exactly how the crowd would react, but the living window display had something for everybody.

Parents brought their keiki to see the sleeping girl, and young adults sought out our staff to ask: “Is she real?”

Indeed, she is. And “sleeping beauty” will be back in the sack from 11 a.m. to 1 p.m. for the next several weeks, if you would like to drop by.

(There is a stable of sleeping beauties, not all of them beautiful girls. Some will be beautiful guys.)

There’s something compelling, apparently, about watching somebody else sleep in public.

The sleeping beauty is making a point: She sleeps contentedly because she knows that the valuables she left with Kamaaina Loan are safe in a bonded, insured warehouse. When she awakes and comes in to reclaim them, they will be there.

Not every pawn shop on Maui can say as much.

Pawn 101: Domestic science in the pawnshop

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Pawnbroking, by definition, involves used stuff, which means dealing with wear and tear and dirt. We clean jewelry and steam diamonds, for example.

Here’s a simple way to deal with dents in your sterling silver hollowware (or gold hollowware, in the rare event you have any of that):

Recently we bought a Tiffany sterling water pitcher with a thumb-size dent in the body, probably from dropping on the floor. Pushing the dent out was easy — just roll a hard sphere back and forth from the inside.

We used a billiard ball.

Yikes! The taxman cometh

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This is the time of year when unexpectedly high tax calculations send people digging in the back of the closet for something they can pawn to help pay the IRS.

Customers don’t have to tell a pawnbroker why they need the money, because the collateral they offer does the talking — we’re different from banks that way — but they often do anyway.

For instance, recently a customer, who said he had to raise a couple of thousand dollars more than he had counted on to meet his tax bill, brought in a silver-gilt sugar bowl. It was dented and tarnished, but it had a history behind it.

According to him, his grandfather had fled Hitler’s armies in Lithuania in 1941 with silver, gold and amber. The sugar bowl was part of that stash that had found its way to Maui 70 years later.

Pawn 101: Jeweler markups

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The following incidents both happened Monday, but something similar occurs just about every day in the pawn shop.

A woman came in wondering if she could sell a gold chain with a small (about the size of a postage stamp) bangle covered in diamonds.

The chain was very fine and the whole item weighed around 7 grams, or about a quarter of an ounce.

It was 18-karat gold, so sure, it had value. We estimated about $150 for the gold and another $50 for the diamonds, which were miele — tiny chips.

The woman and her husband really needed cash, but she hesitated to take the offer. After several exchanges, it came out why: She had paid $2,400 for the jewelry.

That’s right. The retail jeweler had sold it at a price 12 times the value of the materials. And, to tell the truth, probably more than 12 times, because the value of gold has gone way up over the past year.

With mass-produced jewelry, which is what this was, the resale value is almost always the recycling value: the gold is melted, after the diamonds are recovered, and the miele is sold to jewelers for reuse.

$200 was a fair price — it was based on the New York spot price of gold and the world diamond market — but the woman didn’t take it. Too painful to realize the loss, probably.

Later in the afternoon, a man came in with a bracelet string of small, misshapen, grayish pearls — rather pretty but valueless.

He was hoping to get $250 for it. $100? No. $50? Sorry.

But, he said, he had paid $525 for it.

It really had almost no resale value, either as a whole piece or as individual pearls.

He was mighty disappointed and left to shop around. Late in the day, he came back. The answers he had gotten everywhere else were, manana.

Our pawnbroker offered him $10, more as an accommodation than anything else, as we really didn’t want it.

In the end, he kept his bauble.

Facelift at 50

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The Kamaaina Loan tool store at 50 North Market Street is closed today. It is being expanded and brightened and should be ready for business by Tuesday if the paint dries fast enough.

There are lots of changes going on. The Sunday Store at 12 North Market is undergoing an extensive rebuild and will reopen soon.

Not everybody realizes it, but Kamaaina Loan has outlets at 12, 42, 46, 50, 52 and 98 North Market — from one end of the block to the other. And a private parking lot for customers behind 98 (enter from Vineyard Street).

The first sign wavers of spring

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Saw the first political sign wavers of this year this morning in Kahului. It would be nice if it were the last.

It’s hard to figure what sign-waving is supposed to contribute to the political discussion. Just distracts drivers, who, heaven knows, have better things to put their minds to.

Curious things we see

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In an earlier post, we wrote about the limitless variety of stuff that comes through our doors. From time to time, the blog will tell about some of them.

Last year, we were offered several small coins, about the diameter of a button on a man’s shirt, that no one could identify and which didn’t show up in any of our references.

But, since the coins tested as silver, Kamaaina Loan acquired them for their metal value. We had to wait several months for Denis, our obscure coin expert, to tell us what they were.

Denis, who lives in New York, visits us several times a year and goes over the oddballs in the coin drawer.

He identified the small silver coins as Cambodian currency from the 13th or 14th century.

How they ended up on Maui we haven’t a clue.

The real reason gas is up

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I paid $4.60 for gas yesterday morning and this morning it’s up another 6 to 10 cents. Like you, I have read all the reasons why the price is up, and heard all the nostrums for making it go back down. Except one. The real one.


Yes, it’s true that demand in China and elsewhere is pushing prices up, and that restrictions on deliveries from, eg, Iran are pushing prices up. And that sluggish economic activity in Europe pushes it down.


Those are world forces, and despite the ravings of the Republicans, nothing the United states could do can or will have any significant effect.


But this is not the world, it’s America, and prices are rising in America for specifically American reasons: the unhindered stock market is the culprit. And, no, I don’t mean speculation.


In a world market as big as oil, speculation cannot have more than minor and transient effects. Nobody can corner oil.


The character of the American gasoline system has changed fundamentally over the past couple of decades.


It used to be that when world crude prices rose, that was wonderful for owners of oil wells, but not so wonderful for owners of refineries. The world price of crude is almost always more elastic than the price American motorists are willing to pay for gas. When prices rise, use declines and refiners get squeezed.


It used to be that a large fraction of American gasoline came from integrated companies that owned wells, refineries and, often, distribution networks.


Big Oil, say Exxon, didn’t see its profits zoom quite as much when crude rose, but it didn’t see its margins shrink quite as much when crude fell, either. The system was damped.


Wall Street plungers – and excutives who get paid according to what their stock did this quarter – hated this. It was really hard to goose the stock price.


Integrated oil companies broke themselves up. They sold off their refineries, so that the largest refiner is not Exxon or Chevron, but a company nobody ever heard of, Valero.


Few American business managers really believe in the business cycle, and nobody on Wall Street does. The people who bought Valero don’t, although if they are paying attention, they ought to be changing their minds.

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A couple of years ago, when demand was down, Valero and other exclusive refiners saw their profits melt. They did what industrial companies usually do: laid off workers and shut down production lines.


Only, for a variety of reasons, refineries are not like widget assembly lines. They are hard to restart once abandoned.


The managers of Valero and the other refiners were too stupid to imagine that, hey, demand for gas might go up again, and pretty soon. When you are managing by quarters, you cannot afford to think 5 or 6 quarters ahead.


So, the economy improves somewhat and demand for gas rises somewhat (a very small thanks to the Obama administration, which has not done much to help the revival but at least has avoided Republican nostrums that would prevent it from recovering ever).


Eh, voila! We have not a shortage of oil – the country is producing more than ever, despite the lies told by Mitt Romney – but a shortage of refineries.


This is what unregulated markets do. Under Bush II, they crashed the financial system. Obama, more’s the pity, did not do anything to regulate petroleum (and, truth to tell, it’s hard to see how this particular exchange of assets could be regulated), and now they have crashed the domestic gasoline supply system.


A self-inflicted wound.

Pawn 101: Market St. is not Canal St.

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Canal Street in Manhattan, just below Union Square, is a famous, or infamous shopping district where you can find knockoffs of Prada, Gucci, Coach and every other kind of high-end designer merchandise.

At Kamaaina Loan, we make loans on (or buy outright) Prada, Gucci, Coach and other kinds of high-end designer merchandise. But not if we spot that it came from Canal St., or someplace like it.

Can you spot the knock-off? We have resources that help us tell the authentic goods from the fakes, even if you cannot.

So two points:

1. If you want to borrow $100 against that Louis Vuitton handbag, we can accommodate you, probably, but not over the phone. We have to inspect it to see that it’s the real LV.

That’s why we cannot offer estimates over the phone for anything.

2. If you see a designer watch, bag etc. in one of our 5 retail stores — and at an unbelievably great price — it’s not because it’s a fake. If we sell it, we’ve checked and believe it to be authentic.

Our prices are great because our prices are great

Why your rent is so high (If you live in West Maui)

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You may be following (perhaps in The Maui News) a disagreement between the county planning director, Will Spence, and one of the former directors, Mike Foley, about how detailed the county’s general plan should be.

Well, when I was a reporter, I covered the creation of the current plan; and I have watched the gestation of its replacement.

The plans generally try to look ahead 20 years, and to lay out restrictions and allowances for the next 10 years.

The old general plan took 8 or 9 years to pass, so the 10 years was mostly up before anybody knew what was in it.

What wasn’t in it was much provision for new residential districts in West Maui. As a result, rents went way up. Several hundred million dollars were thereby transferred from the pockets of Maui workers to landlords (many of them not on Maui).

Before this gets corrected, if it ever does, the transfer will top a billion dollars.

That’s right. County dilatoriness will have moved over $1,000,000,000 from the pockets of county taxpayers to other pockets.

The landlords have been very happy (except for the gamblers who thought the gravy train had no caboose and overleveraged).

The current attempt to create a new general plan – called the Maui Island Plan and done under new rules since the old rules didn’t work – is years behind schedule. Not 8 or 9 years yet, but it won’t be long.

Earth to Spence. Earth to Foley. It doesn’t matter what details are in a plan that has not been enacted.

The problem is not with the details. The problem is with completion.