Catching up with Rick Harrison

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America’s most famous pawnbroker now has a bartender’s card, to go along with his saloon and other businesses opening in October.

 

He told the Las Vegas Sun he’s looking forward to the time when people will have only hazy memories of “Pawn Stars” but apparently coffee and donuts are forever:

 

Harrison also plans to open a wedding chapel, in part to revive the flagging industry along Las Vegas Boulevard South.

Otherwise, the businesses planned for Pawn Plaza are as odd a fit as the plaza’s mismatched color scheme. All are independent businesses or small franchises, such as Rita’s Italian Ice, Smoke’s Poutinerie, Vegas Flip Flops, So-Cal Speed Shop, Inna Gadda di Pizza and Pawn Donut & Coffee.

Java jive

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A nice, doomed pawnshop Photo from East Sider

A nice, doomed pawnshop
Photo from East Sider

Well, excuuuse us, but $3 cups of coffee do not indicate gentrification.

A strange little story in the L.A. Eastsider is headlined:

There’s no place for a pawn shop in gentrifying Echo Park

As evidence of rampant gentrification, the East Sider notes

One by one, the adjoining Sunset Boulevard storefronts on either side of the Echo Park Pawn Shop have been renovated and replaced with new tenants . The high-ceiling interior of Sage Vegan Bistro is often busy with customers sharing plates of jackfruit nachos or ordering $3.99 scoops of vegan ice cream.  A few storefronts down, San Francisco-based Blue Bottle Coffee, where a cup of drip coffee usually goes for $3,  is preparing to open a shop.

So sorry, East Sider, but our little Maui pawnshop shares a block with a nice coffee shop (Wailuku Coffee Co.) where coffee is well over $3 a cup ($2 if you pour your own in the morning rush), and there’s no place on the island where you can get a scoop of ice cream for a mere $3.99, vegan or otherwise.

We don’t dispute the story’s statement that the landlord is pushing out the pawn shop in hopes of attracting higher-paying tenants. But $3 coffee? It takes more than that to separate the beautiful people from the rest of us.

Image v. reality

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Almost since the Kamaaina Loan blog began, we have been writing about how “Pawn Stars” and other reality programs have tended to improve the public perception of what pawnshops are like. We are all too familiar with the image presented in the old Rod Steiger film “The Pawnbroker.”

genuine

 

Even then – and that was half a century ago –the movie portrayal was far from reality. Just as, when you think about it, the “Big Bang Theory,” the most popular show on network TV, doesn’t provide a realist6ic view of how geniuses live.

So, what are real pawnshops really like?  Are they dark places where thieves slouch in, looking to convert a hot laptop into a couple of sawbucks? Hardly. For one thing, pawnbrokers have embraced technology. Stores are bright and open, so that surveillance cameras can be effective. Most of the nation’s 12,000 pawnbrokers also use technology to record driver’s licenses, serial numbers and other detailed information about both the merchandise they are offered and the customers.

That includes a thumb print.

A scoundrel looking to break the law could hardly leave more evidence if he tried.

Then look at the goods in a pawnshop’s retail department. (Almost all pawnbrokers are also licensed secondhand dealers.) Diamond jewelry, good watches, gold, good guitars. Pawnshop customers are, overwhelmingly, people with jobs and therefore with assets and money to spend.

Most goods in the retail division were not pawns that someone failed to repay. At Kamaaina Loan  And Cash For Gold, redemptions are at an all-time high—90%.

Retail stock (when it is not new, like our Kala ukuleles and some silver jewelry) is good stuff people didn’t want to keep. Maybe they were moving to a different island, or they are buying a better guitar and want to sell us their old one to help pay for the new one.

Or they realized that that designer handbag in the closet hasn’t been used for months because they have a new style that suits them better.

So they sell it to us and we sell it to you.

Maybe, in the movie, Rod Steiger dealt with down-and-outers, but when we take in a designer handbag that cost $2,000 new and that we resell for $800, we are still talking about upscale consumption.

To put it another way, the goods we sell are the same goods that were originally sold at the mall. Just used a little and marked down a lot. And our customers are the same as the shoppers in the mall, just with maybe a sharper eye for a bargain.

 

 

Gun shy

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This is just too silly not to pass on. In Florida, a man tried to shoplift a firearm from a pawnshop.

So?

It was an AK47. He stuffed it down his pants leg.

And limped out till the pawnbroker stopped him.

The Sun-Sentinel has his mug shot. I’d keep an eye on him if he were in our pawnshop, even though we don’t carry firearms.ak

The Sun-Sentinel plays the story straight. HuffingonPost rewrites it with one of  the more obvious joke lines. But it isn’t funny.

 

We get calls

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But the callers don’t always appreciate an honest answer.

Caller to Kamaaina Loan pawnshop: Do you buy jewelry if it is gold-filled?

Us: We’ll look at anything, but “gold-filled” really means “no gold.”

Caller: It means “no gold”?

Us: It’s something retailers have used for years and years. There is a microscopically thin covering of gold, but essentially it means no gold.

Caller (sounding kind of exasperated): That’s good to know. Thank you.

 

What’s a GG? Why should you care?

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Last week, a young man came into Kamaaina Loan with a “diamond” in his hand, and another one in his ear.diamond

He explained that the earring had been his grandmother’s. Now, first, let us say we think it is sweet that a young man would wear his tutu-wahine’s earring. That’s not something that would have happened in the old days.

The stone had fallen out of the other earring of the pair, and he said he wondered: Is this a real diamond?

That was the easy part. Slap the stone under the electronic tester. Nope, not real.

But what if it had been real? That’s when a GG (Graduate Gemologist) is your friend.

That young man’s “diamond” was around a third of a carat, and it would have been worth serious coin if it were also of high quality. Most diamonds we see are, of course, average.

Value is based on the “4 Cs” (cut, color, clarity and carat size); and when you get into the bigger and better stones, a difference of opinion of one grade level can be worth hundreds of dollars. That’s when a GG comes in, and Kamaaina Loan is the only pawnshop on Maui with a GG on staff. (You can see her diploma on the wall at our diamond store at 96 N. Market St.)

The Gemological Institute of America is a non-profit research and educational organization (www.gia.edu). Those certificates are not easily earned.

gia

GGs don’t rely only on experience. They have expensive instruments (colorimeters, powerful microscopes), but when it gets down to it, experience is what counts.

This is even more crucial if the stone in question is “colored” (ruby, emerald, amethyst, and hundreds of others).

So if you want an accurate evaluation, now you know where on Maui you want to go.

 

 

A pawnbroker with a heart of platinum

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Most of our customers don’t have even one gold album, let alone 5 platinum ones, so this incident from the Top Cash Pawn Shop in Plano, Texas, is unlikely to be repeated at Kamaaina Loan. But it’s a wonderful little story.

According to the Plano Star-Courier, it seems rapper D.O.C. left his five — count ’em 5 — platinum albums with a friend during a move and then lost track of the friend. Don’t you hate when that happens?

Years pass. Taylor Packwood of Top Cash Pawn makes a loan on the albums, which is renewed for years and years but eventually forfeited.

More time passes. Long story short, a D.O.C. fan spots the albums, uses social media to alert the musician, and Packwood says he’ll return them to the star, no charge.

“They’re both just in shock, No. 1, that they wound up here, but that they actually found them,” Packwood said. “What they’ve told me is that there are a few more out there somewhere, five more matching gold plaques.”

 

What will pawnbrokers think of next?

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A rendering of the Badlands pawn shop. We think that 's a helicopter on the roof

A rendering of the Badlands pawn shop. We think that ‘s a helicopter on the roof

On little Maui, we refer to our retail store at 96 N. Market as “our big store,” because it’s about 4 times the size of our original location at 42 N. Market (now being turned into a framing shop by another business).

Everything is relative. On the Mainland, there seems to be a trend to mega-pawnstores, in the 20,000-square-foot range. But, hey, why stop there?

That appears to be the mantra of Chuck Brennan of Sioux City, Iowa, a concert promoter whose latest promotion is “the Disneyland of pawn shops,” a $15 million, 53,000-square-foot emporium of everything that would attract a shopper in northwest Iowa — a gun range where you can fire a .50-caliber machine gun; 20 restrooms such as you would find in a luxury hotel; a foundry where gold coins will be minted; an FM radio station; a tattoo parlor; and, oh yes, a pawn shop.

The report in the Sioux City Journal does not say anything about food, aside from nickel coffee, and nothing really about the pawn shop; but we’re guessing there will be a place to chow down on local delicacies like loose meat sandwiches.

That’s loose meat, not moose meat. Crumbled ground beef cooked so that the fat runs off and served on a hamburger bun. Gourmet dining in northwest Iowa.

We have heard of pawn shops that also performed weddings, but Brennan’s Badlands Pawn Shop Gold & Jewelry is the most ambitious expansion of the basic loan emporium we have heard of, and, to tell the truth, way beyond anything we ever imagined when talking over what we could do to make Kamaaina Loan an even better place for borrowers.

Sioux City is half the size of Maui and has weather about one-tenth as attractive, but Brennan’s venture is near the intersection of two Interstate highways, so maybe it will take its place with other improbable attractions that take advantage of Interstate off-ramps, like South of the Border in South Carolina and the original In-and-out Burger in Baldwin Park, California. (OK, nitpickers, it wasn’t on an Interstate, because in 1948 there weren’t any Interstatesw, but it was strategically situated near a freeway ramp.)

 

 

How pawn shops get stuff

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On the Kamaaina Loan webcast from First Friday in Wailuku, Jason Schwartz and I tried to explain how pawn shops come by the odd and fabulous things we sometimes get to put on our shelves.

I was concentrating on tools, since in January we usually have some terrific bargains. You see, wives and girlfriends buy their husbands and boyfriends tools for Christmas, but they don’t know what they need, so they end up getting them stuff they already have.

The husbands and boyfriends then sell the duplicates to us, often still in unopened packaging. So akamai toolhounds know to shop the tool store at 50 N. Market St. in the weeks after Christmas for extraspecial bargains.

But today we find an ESPN story about how a pawnshop ended up with something even rarer and more special than a new tool — a Super Bowl ring awarded to someone who wasn’t on the winning team.

It isn’t an especially happy story, since the ring’s owner had to surrender it following a personal bankruptcy, but presumably his creditors got some joy out of it.

But remember, if you need money and want to sell something to your friendly pawnbroker, you don’t have to tell us why. You do have to attest that it is your property and leave your name, address, picture and thumb print, so if you stole it, you’d be pretty stupid bringing it to a pawn shop.

But if you are a little embarrassed — personally as well as financially — we sympathize — but we don’t have to know why, Lots of people tell us anyway, but that’s a topic for another day.

‘Getting the chair,’ but in a good way

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From Norwich, Conn., we learn of a pawnbroker who took the old advice and made lemonade from his lemons.

According to WTNH television, it began 5 years ago when Phil Pavone of A-Z Pawn bought a couple of motorized wheelchairs, expecting to resell them. They didn’t move, so he had another thought.

Kamaaina Loan blog called Pavone to get the rest of the story, with more perspective from pawnbroking operations than WTNH’s story provided:

It turns out, there’s more to creating a mobility project than taking in chairs by one door and handing them out at another. Pavone started by running newspaper ads, asking anyone with a disability to write or email him about their problem and how a chair would help.

chair

He got 60 submissions.”I heard from people who had been homebound for years. . . .  You cannot believe how many flippin’ people fall between the cracks of eligibility. It’s a disaster.”

Pavone, a cancer survivor, says he understands what it means to be sick. He went out and bought four more chairs to give away.

From there, it grew, but not without a big push from him. “The most expensive part of the whole thing was getting the word out.” He advertised heavily in newspapers and on television for two years.

Now that he is established as “the go-to guy” in his area, the chairs come in to him as donations or inexpensive purchases. The program costs him around $10,000 a year.

A team of volunteers refurbishes the chairs, which usually amounts to no more than a new battery or a charger. A battery distributor provides batteries at cost.

Then he and his volunteers match the chair to the applicant: by weight (up to 250-300 pounds; or over 300); right or left-hand controls. Occasionally, a recipient will require a tilting chair to keep legs elevated.

“It’s not a tax writeoff,” says Pavone, who has two shops, one in Florida.”It’s about looking in the frickin’ mirror and liking what you see.”

He keeps his “Gift of Mobility” campaign going year-round. Sometimes he installs a chair in his shop with a placard, asking for donations of no-longer-needed chairs.

Then, about this time of year, he advertises for more stories. (He asks and gets special rates on this advertising.) His volunteers fix up the chairs and a few days before Christmas they lend pickup trucks to deliver chairs to recipients who cannot come to A-Z Pawn.

As of Veterans Day, he had “at least 40-45 chairs” to present, and another 11 or so being spruced up and probably to be ready by donation day (around Dec. 21).

You can learn more about Gift of Mobility, with links to Youtube videos of past campaigns, here.

#mauipawn #mauiretail