Feel like Chinese tonight?

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chrysanthemum

So, we were talking about places to eat on Maui, and one among us said, “Do you realize that since Dragon Dragon closed, there are no Chinese restaurants on Maui?”

At least, not outside West Maui and Kihei. China Boat has been around nearly 25 years, serving a fairly limited menu of Chinese Mandarin dishes, like Mongolian Beef and Mu Shu Pork. But it is remarkable that on a tourist island like Maui, one with a long local Chinese tradition to boot, that there are so few Chinese restaurants and such a limited cuisine among the few that remain.

In a similar sized tourist mecca on the Mainland, you’d likely have to choose among Hunan, Sichuan, Canton and maybe Fujian styles. Here, ever since Golden Jade closed, it’s been all downhill.

In Central Maui, there are a couple of “Chinese” restaurants, including a new one, Dragonfly on Lower Main, which has a few dishes, like Mu Shu Pork, and, unusually and from the opposite end of the scale, Egg Fu Young.

So, yes you can sort of get Chinese food on Maui. But what about the rest of the tourism business?

Stella Blues is gone. The Sugar Cane Train is going. Yet tourism headcounts are supposed to be high if not growing. This is not the economic atmosphere in which you expect old-established businesses like Stella’s or the LK&P to be shutting down.

#mauitourism #mauidining

chrysanthemum

Ain’t nothin’ like the real thing

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As Smokey Robinson so wisely taught us long ago.

It appears that the magic of “Pawn Stars” is limited to the actual Gold & Silver Pawn Shop cast, at least if you value the opinion of critic Steve Bornfeld.

There’s a Vegas show called “Pawn Shop Live!” that’s supposed to be a spoof of the top-rated cable “reality show.” Vegas Steve didn’t like it when it opened early this year, and now that it has been revamped, he likes it even less:

Flashing back to the original Pawn Shop Live! at the Golden Nugget in February, I labeled it “an amateurish misfire of major proportions.” Updating to the rewritten Pawn Shop Live! at the Riviera, I amend that to “an amateurish misfire of TITANIC proportions.”

We suggest authenticity counts with tongue in cheek. Much as we like “Pawn Stars” and appreciate how much it has done to enhance the reputation of pawn shops everywhere, life with Rick and the family is not really what pawnbroking is like.

Pawnshops, including our Maui pawn shop, do get fascinating, rare and curious items from time to time, but emphasize time to time. Not all the time, like on “Pawn Stars.”

Here’s a secret: TV reality shows are scripted. And not only that, but a show like “Pawn Stars” has agents who comb the country for telegenic items to “pawn.” The owners, who get a chance to explain their treasures on a big stage, cooperate but those are not real transactions.

The valuation offered by Rick may be authentic,  but it’s all for show not dough.

If you think about it for a moment, you can understand. It costs thousands — in the case of “Pawn Stars” tens of thousands — of dollars to create each minute of program. The producers cannot wait around until the next interesting customer walks in.

Even “Antiques Roadshow,” which does draw thousands of hopefuls to each city it visits, sends out advance agents to recruit good antiques and even arranges to transport the big items (like Federal-period highboys) to the auditorium where the show is taped.

If you want to see a real pawn shop in action, come down to 52 North Market Street any day of the week. But you might have to wait several days for any excitement.

Boston pawnbrokers save the day

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Imaging-resource.com, a website for serious photographers, alerts us to this heartwarming story that will resonate with many, many visitors to Maui who have lost cameras — to trunk poppers or otherwise.

 

A Nikon D3100

A Nikon D3100

Someone found a camera left on the Red Line and brought it to Michael Goldstein at Empire Loan. The con artist didn’t know what he had or even how to turn it on. When Empire’s alert pawnbrokers began asking questions, he fled, leaving the camera.

Goldstein then used photos in the camera memory to sleuth out the owners, who had posted a lost-and-found appeal on Craigslist. He is shipping the camera to them at their home in Spain.

Image-resources has some good advice for vacationers and their cameras, including this one:

Get a card reader for your tablet or smartphone and use it to back up your photos while you’re on vacation—that way, if the camera gets swiped, at least you’ll still have your shots.

Honeymooner alert: We cannot recall all the pathetic appeals over the years from honeymooners on Maui who lost (usually, had stolen out of their rental car) their wedding photos. Listen to Liam McCabe at image-resources. It couldn’t hurt.

#Maui #maui photo #maui vacation #lost camera

Big cat fight on Maui

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There’s a hot cat fight going on here on Maui. But ours is just the local edition of a cat fight that is making fur fly all across the country.

Thrill killers?

Thrill killers?

You may have been following the controversy about the Maui Humane Society, its departing executive director and the strident campaign of cat (but not bird) lovers to introduce a “no-kill” policy at the society, which gets most of its money through a county animal control contract. There’s more here (though behind The Maui News paywall).

And still more here about the situation in New York City, just to show we are not alone..

In theory, cats can be controlled by having cat lovers capture and spay or neuter feral cats, then return them to their happy hunting grounds, feeding and watering them, until they die of old age. Problem solved.

This is not how it works in real life. There was a cat colony at Iao Valley State Park, and a few years ago if you went up there after dark and shined your headlights into the forest, you would see hundreds of cats’ eyes looking back at you. During the day, scores of cats patroled the parking lot.

You cannot go into the park after dark any more, so the spooky cat crowd is not on display; and the last time I was at the parking lot it was not overrun with cats. I don’t know if that means the cat colony has diminished, but I doubt it has.

Colonies of Jackson’s chameleons, nene and pueo do die out. Cat colonies and cattle egrets, hardly ever. Usually, it seems that people who are dropping off their unwanted cats (instead of drowning them, which was customary in bygone times) look for existing cat colonies, presumably so their cat will have company and three squares a day.

On Maui, there is the issue of ground-nesting birds, especially seabirds. Some of these are endangered. All of them are slaughtered by cats. Few seabirds even try to nest on the island, and when they do they are usually mauled.

Even well-fed cats will hunt and kill for pleasure.

The upside of this is that without our thousands of blood-crazed cats, there would be even more feral chickens everywhere.

 

#maui cats #feral cats #no-kill #maui

 

 

Pawn shops take over the Big Apple

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According to an article in Crain’s New York Business, there are now 493 pawnshops in New York, up by 50 percent (when you include secondhand dealers) since 2010. The big growth is in high-end pawnshops, which cater to the pawn-my-Picasso set.

Blogging for gold -- what we do at Kamaaina Loan blog

Blogging for gold — what we do at Kamaaina Loan blog

This from CNBC’s Robert Frank, who blogs about “Wealth.” He opines:

I could understand why the wealthy needed pawn shops in 2009 and 2010. But with stocks and other asset values so high, and with the wealth of the wealthy back to all-time highs, I’m having a hard time figuring out just who these cash-strapped “rich” are today.

Huh. He must not know many wealthy people. For every one who can plunk down cash for a McMansion, there’s another whose assets are tied up in lettered (temporarily unsalable) stock; stock options; real property; or otherwise something that they feel reluctant to liquidate.

Like gold. Gold has been rising for a few days (thank you again, Mr. Putin!), but it is still no higher than $1,356. While that is a pleasant $25 an ounce more than it was 30 days ago, it is an unpleasant $300 or $400 less than it was if you bought gold a year or two ago.

Lots of people (we surmise) who bought gold for the long term, and still expect that to pay off, would rationally be willing to pawn their gold to meet current obligations, rather than realizing their losses, and be able redeem it next month (or 2 months) and keep on keepin’ on with their long-term strategy.

Even people who bought gold last May when it dropped near $1,200 and would therefore show a profit if they sold today might still expect plenty of upside and be reluctant to sell out now and miss that.

The reputation of pawnshops as the resort of the desperate is not incorrect. In fact, our Maui pawn shop takes pride in being willing to help desperate people who no one else will deal with.  But most of Kamaaina Loan’s customers are not desperate.

Fingertips -- no good for paying your utility bill

Fingertips — no good for paying your utility bill

Typically, they are evening out cash flows. If you are a person who works for a fixed wage, life would be very different if you were in the visitor industry and saw your income yo-yo up and down with the seasons.

MECO bills tend to run around the same amount each month, and MECO wants to be paid each month, even if some months your tips or commissions drop to almost nothing.

 

Big surf

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Yesterday, I drove out to Hookipa to look at the surf. From Baldwin Avenue around the old men’s home, you could see the whole coast was closed out, with surf crashing over the outer reef.

The picture doesn’t show it very well — iPhone cameras weren’t made for that.

It was the heaviest surf I’ve seen in several years, though nowhere near as big as I’ve seen it a long time ago. The big sets came intermittently, and the crests were far apart. At its biggest, Hookipa surf comes in tightly bunched and crashes hard enough to make the ground shake.

Wednesday was nowhere close to that. But it did come quite early in the season.

There’s been some blather about global warming in connection with the typhoon in the Philippines, part of the promised more and bigger storms. You sure can’t prove that by Maui (or by measuring Accumulated Storm Energy worldwide, either).

It rained hard at Kahului Airport Sunday; set a record that doubled the old record for a short period. It wasn’t raining hard Upcountry, and I didn’t realize there was a downpour Downcountry or I’d have rushed to see whether the intersection at Hana Highway and Dairy Road flooded.

That intersection used to flood two or three or more times a year, and become impassable every other year or so, a serious matter since that’s how you get to the airport from the tourist areas. One time in the late ’80s, I forget which year, there was a three-day storm that closed off that intersection for days, cutting off East Maui from West and South Maui.

The alternative way along Hansen Road flooded, too, and that was closed. I reported that East Maui was completely cut off, although it is possible that in a truck you could have gotten down Amala Place, through the airport and out along Haleakala Highway to Hana Highway. I didn’t try it, and it wouldn’t have made a difference in the big picture anyway.

My story in The Maui News made a big deal of the fact that if the state closed Haleakala Highway north of Hana Highway, which it was proposing to do as part of the runway extension, flooding at Dairy and Hansen would truly cut off East Maui any time there was a moderate rainstorm. (Ed Tanji, then reporting for the Advertiser, thought I overreacted; he believed Hansen Road had been closed by a rookie cop who didn’t understand the situation; but he was kind enough not to say a malihini reporter had misunderstood, too.)

Gov. John Waihee, trying to soothe the furor over the runway and flush with $500 million from Duty Free Shoppers that could be spent only on airport projects, ordered Haleakala Highway rebuilt around the end of the runway, which never was extended. Nowadays, if you wonder why the road wanders around in the fields and requires you to make three mysterious dogleg turns, it’s because John Waihee wanted to keep me happy.

It cost $1,000,000, the most anybody has ever spent to make me happy.

Later, as part of the development of Kmart and other big box stores, the intersection of Dairy and Hana was rebuilt. (It was raised, so that the cross-streets flood now in a heavy dew.)

The point (and I do have one, though it has taken a while to get to it) is that after the intersection was raised, it stopped raining. Whenever I saw Warren Unemori, who designed the road, I’d ask him if he was sure it would handle a big storm, and he always smiled and said he was sure it would. But for more than 20 years, until Sunday, it was never tested.

So, whenever the alarmists say we are going to have to weather more and bigger storms, you can’t prove it by me.

The Dairy-Hana intersection stayed open, so Warren was right.

One place pawnshops get respect

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Pawnbrokers — including Kamaaina Loan blog — often lament that the image of pawnshops with the public is generally low. But there’s one place where we rank high. In fact, as far as we know, the highly-regarded Fender company is the only business that uses “pawnshop” as part of its branding.

Fender has just announced an addition to its fairly new Pawn Shop Special series, a small amp called the Ramparte that

looks the part of the perfect pawnshop prize.

Who knows how many now-famous musicians would never have been heard of if they hadn’t scored cheap used amps and guitars and mixing boards from a pawn shop when they were starting out poor, hungry and working gigs for free? Many, we think.

Tools 086

Maui, whose tourist business supports a high concentration of talented players, is awash with quality instruments (and some of middling goodness), and there are always a few in our retail store at 98 North Market Street.

There are even more in the warehouse, but most of those you’ll never see in the store. They go back to the owners, who have pawned them. Not because they needed money but because they are off on a tour or for a recording date — as the pros so often are — and the akamai ones have figured out that it’s a whole lot cheaper and safer to pawn their instruments with us than to put them in storage.

Our bonded and insured warehouse is climate-c0ntrolled.

The musicians may have come on this cool trick on their own, or they may have learned it from Jerry Clower’s Uncle Versie Ledbetter.

Luxury asset lending

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One thing Kamaaina Loan blog hasn’t covered much is how pawnbrokers do business with small businesses.  Usually, the actual transaction is with an individual, as with the vast majority of pawn loans, but “luxury asset lending” differs because it is a loan for much more money than a typical pawn loan, and it is taken out to tide an operating business over a financial hump — like making a payroll, which is much different from asking for a few hundred dollars to cover an emergency car repair.

Our comfortable Private Transaction Room

Our comfortable Private Transaction Room

This sort of loan has been a part of the pawnbroking business right along, but only with the increased attention paid to pawn (thanks to cable TV) has it acquired a name — personal asset lending, luxury asset lending or collateral-based lending.

None of the terms is especially well chosen, but that’s what the financial press has decided to go with.

Collateral-based lending, also called personal asset, luxury asset lending, is small but fast-growing, part of the shadow-lending sector that has emerged since traditional credit dissipated after the financial crisis.

The Wall Street Journal estimates it could soon grow to a multibillion-dollar segment, which sounds big but would be trivial compared to the big sources of short-term business money, like commercial paper.

Here’s a typical example of how it works: Let’s say a small general contractor has to make payroll but, for some reason, a progress payment on a project hasn’t come in on time. He needs several thousand or maybe a few tens of thousands of dollars, and he needs it fast.

Banks and other lenders cannot react that fast. Credit cards might work  but only if the borrower has a lot left on his credit lines.

Who can give a businessman $25,000 in cash in 15 minutes? A pawnbroker can. If the businessman has a gold Rolex, or something similar. A safe deposit box of gold coins will do. Even a stamp collection, although it would likely take more than 15 minutes to value that.

Now, let’s say our general contractor also does not want to be seen handing his Rolex across the pawn counter. People might talk. At Kamaaina Loan, we have him covered.

Call 242-5555, explain you want to do a “luxury asset loan” and we’ll open our Private Transaction Room, which is accessed via a private entrance well away from the pawn entrance. We’ll even send a limousine to bring you and your Rolex (diamond tennis bracelet, Krugerrands etc.) to us.

 

“Small business owners are not willing to extend themselves further into debt without more assurances of an economic recovery and stability,” says Paul Aitken, CEO of personal asset-based lender Borro Inc., in a press release, noting that small business borrowing has continued to decline. “The macroeconomic picture shows indications that the recovery should be on its way, but small business owners don’t share that same sentiment. “The consequence of accumulating too much debt has become more than people are willing to accept,” he adds. “Personal asset lending continues to be a favorable option as it avoids the potential pitfall of damaging credit scores.”

As with all pawn loans, we don’t care what your credit score is. Your Rolex is good enough for us.

 

 

We see this happen, too

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From  a summary of a new episode of “Hardcore Pawn,” set on a day when gold has taken a big drop (although the claim that it dropped 5% is bogus — that would be around $75 and gold doesn’t move that much in a day):

When a woman came into pawn her gold bracelet, she was told she could get $250. She had received $300 in the past for it and demanded the same. When she was told that the price of gold had dropped, she told the woman at the window that it was not her problem and wanted to see a manager. When Ashley came to confront her, she called her out to the parking lot, without Byron. Ashley handed her back her bracelet and told her to have a good day.

At our Maui pawn shop, we have a lot of customers who pawn the same item over and over. They know and we know what the loan value is, and writing up those loans goes really fast.

Maui is a tourist island, and plenty of workers in the visitor industry have busy and slow periods. They use pawn loans to smooth out their cash flow so they don’t get behind in  their bills.

Most of these regular customers are quite sophisticated about the value of their collateral. Unlike the lady in the “Hardcore Pawn” episode, they don’t get bent out of shape when they’re told they cannot get as much as usual.

On the other hand, sometimes when gold is rising, a Kamaaina Loan pawnbroker will be asked for, say, $100 and will check the New York gold price and say, “You know, you can get more for this now.”

Some take more, some say, “No, that’s all right. $100 is what I need.”

The really sophisticated ones recognize that some lendable items can lose a lot of their appeal overnight. This is true, for example, of video game systems. When the new Xbox or Playstation comes out, the old ones lose a lot of their value. Since the game system makers usually announce new versions well in advance, the value actually starts adjusting well before the new version is released.

What are they worth now?

What are they worth now?

Something similar happens with cellphones. They are very lendable, but every new version of the iPhone makes the old ones worth less. There have been so many versions of the iPod that it takes a maven to keep straight the market value of the various models and features.

Gold, silver and diamonds are less predictable. They aren’t coming out with a new version of gold.

Gold today is under $1,300 an ounce. It was over $1,300 a few days ago. No telling where it will be next week, particularly since the issue of the government shutdown is still unsettled as this is written.

 

Exploiting Native Hawaiians

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Ian Lind (at ilind.net) has a good report from the trial of the Hawaiiloa Foundation  (which is on Oahu although the actions originated on Maui) and it is worth your time to read.

The Maui News has not caught up with this story.

Lind (a retired newspaper reporter now blogging local issues) examined some of the documents used to collect fees to “save” Hawaiians from having to pay mortgages. His conclusion:

Both claim to draw authority from a hodgepodge of sources from Hawaiian royal land patents to the Magna Carta, and both include an “Insurance and Indemnity Bond of Ownership” claiming to draw on $300 million “of lawful specie alloy or exchange in market currency” via the “Hawaiian Treasury: Waihona Waiwai, backed in gold, silver and national securities derived fro 33/1/3% kanaka vested lands, resources and rights.”

The two documents are essentially identical, with the appearance of a legalistic form filled with obscure and sometimes nonsensical gobbledygook.

– See more at: http://www.ilind.net/2013/10/11/on-scams-and-the-sovereignty-narrative/#comments