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Old bugbears

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wind

It is amusing to watch Mauians, even newcomers, rushing to stock up on rice and toilet paper in anticipation of storms Iselle and Julio.

Buying bottled water makes no sense either.

Batteries, yes. Tank of gas? Half a tank ought to be plenty for most people. Cash? Maybe, where are you going that you will be spending money? If it really does rain 4 to 8 inches Thursday and maybe again Sunday, I am not going anywhere except in an emergency. Nor will I be calling for pizza delivery.

It’s been over 20 years since we’ve experienced a big storm and nearly that long since even a moderately big one. With a population turnover in the neighborhood of 4% a year, probably half the people on Maui (not counting the tourists) have never been through even the outliers of a hurricane.

Stocking up on TP has more to do with memories — second hand at that for most people — of dock strikes over 60 years ago. Distribution methods have changed a lot since, and a TP or rice famine is hard to take seriously now.

But rushing to the stores to stock up doesn’t hurt anybody and probably has more to do with socializing than real preparedness. It gives people a chance to ask each other if they are being prudent and to reassure themselves that, 1) it won’t be that bad; and 2) they’ve done what they can (short of offering a bed indoors to a homeless person, something I haven’t seen or heard any concern about, although the shelterless are one group that could have a rough time even if Iselle arrives as nothing much more than a winter windstorm).

Sustained winds of 55 mph, if that’s what we are going to get, are no scarier than the usual winter nights, where 60 is common.

Should either storm turn out much worse than current forecasts (always possible, remember that the Butterfly Effect means that forecasts more than 5 days out are pretty much imaginary), or if you have the rotten luck to have a tree fall on your car in even a moderate blow, make sure your insurer will honor its contract.

After Iniki, a lot of people on Kauai and Oahu got stiffed. Amongst all the precautions I have seen being passed around, no one has mentioned that one.

And bottled water. Fill a jug from the faucet. County water is just fine.

Why make a police report?

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Here’s an unusual story from Wyoming and South Dakota which reinforces the notion that you should always make a police report when you experience a theft, even though statistics show that the vast majority of burglaries are never solved; and with sneak thefts, the clearance rate must be even smaller.

(One in 8 burglaries are cleared, according to the FBI.)

burglar

It is not unusual for someone to come into our Maui pawn shop and alert us to something that was stolen, in case someone brings it in and tries to cash in. And when we say,”‘Have you filed a police report?” very often they say, “No, it’s not worth it.”

Well, yeah, burglaries are hard crimes to solve (see link above), but without the palapala, how are we to know the item was stolen?

In the Wyoming case, the item — a World War I gas mask — was lost or stolen from a museum display back in the ’20s. In this case, if there was a police report, it has long since disappeared, but the item did have a label saying it came from the “Pennewill Collection.”

Hardly anybody has heard of the Pennewill Collection, but there’s always somebody, and he’s on the Internet.  The label was nearly as good as a serial number, and the mask was restored to the Wyoming State Museum.

Chris Johnson,  the Rapid City pawnbroker who bought the mask — almost certainly not from somebody who realized it was stolen property — said the right thing afterward:

“Any time we hear that something has been stolen, it gives us a little bit of a sinking feeling,” Johnson said. But he added that he was pleased to be able to donate it to the Cheyenne museum.

“You can’t put a price tag on giving something back to the rightful owners,” Johnson said.

The AP story does not make it clear, but apparently the museum had both a record and somebody on the staff who was aware of the theft from 90 or so years ago.

Purse matching

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Jordan Tabach-Bank is one of the best pawnbrokers at getting media attention, so we are happy to piggyback on his skill by linking to a piece at Pawn Times about pawning Hermes bags.

Kamaaina Loan also takes high-end  bags for loans, and we are not quite as snooty as Tabach-Bank’s Beverly Pawn, which takes only Hermes, Chanel or Celine, and then only models that retail (new) for $5,000 and up.

Kamaaina Loan will lend money even on down-market stuff like Coach. And even if it retails for only a few hundred.

Here’s a tip that’s good for either pawn shop:

Handbags must be in excellent condition and be accompanied by provenance or proof of purchase, usually in the form of receipt from the original retailer.

Well, we don’t absolutely require an original receipt, but it helps seal the deal. So all you fashionistas out there, save your receipts. Because you never know when (or why) you might need to raise some fast cash.

We generally have a fancy  bag or two or three in our store at 42 N. Market. (Just checked: about a dozen items today.)

Do you know you can rent Hermes bags? Not from us, but it can be done.

 

Fixing the price

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As Kamaaina Loan blog has often said, we (and all other pawnbrokers) are at the mercy of the international gold market. We have no way to influence the price.

If we offer you $500 on Monday because gold is selling at, say, $1300, and it goes down the next day to $1200, that’s our risk. Nothing we can do about it. (And if the price goes up, lucky us.)

It would be nice to think that gold is a true market. We don’t want to play if somebody is scamming the game.

It turns out, somebody is. Or was. In this Bloomberg News report, we learn how a Barclays trader managed to depress the world price by a few cents in order to cheat a client out of $3.9 million.

The manipulation was small and lasted only minutes. Not enough to affect our pawnshop, but worrying nonetheless.

We would like to think that the world market is big enough and free enough to avoid serious manipulation. But we know people will try.

(Barclays was in a position to work this scam because it is one of 4 banks that participate in the daily “London fixing.” The other members are from Canada, Scotland and France, reflecting the international balance of influence in 1919 when this system was set up.)

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Boulevard of Broken Promises

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Among the smaller items in the Maui County budget — which will far exceed half a BILLION dollars, we are not a small, rural place any more — but one close to Kamaaina Loan’s interests is the Iao Minipark (or whatever its final name turns out to be).

The historic Wailuku business district, which we are proud to be one of the oldest existing veterans of, was designed for horse-drawn buggies and walkers. North Market Street was not paved for many years. Then after World War II, everybody got wheels.

Congestion.

The county took a bold step, buying up several blocks and closing a couple of streets (alleys, really) to create the large Wailuku municipal parking lot. Since then, it’s been all downhill as far as parking has been concerned.

In other older places struggling to adapt to modern  habits, the county has added significant public parking: a million-dollar lot in Makawao and a similar one in Paia. Presumably these are partially responsible for the full storefronts and higher commercial rents in those towns. (Having top drawer tourist draws helped, too, of course.)

Wailuku languishes. Commercial rents in Paia are about four times higher than in the North Market Street area.

Much follows from low rents. Non-profits, which are attracted by low rents, swarm in Wailuku but are absent from Paia and Makawao. In those “country towns,” merchants compete vigorously for shop space and there are few vacant buildings. There has been new construction in Paia and lots of investment in keeping up the old buildings in Makawao.

Not in Wailuku. Space goes begging and comparatively less sprucing up occurs. Green Lotus has recently upgraded and reopened a vacant gas station on Main Street that had been vacant for over a decade (despite having its own parking). Only one new-from-the-foundations building has gone up in our district in the past decade.

What construction has occurred has chipped away at our parking.

Now the county proposes to chip some more.

No question the vacant, unpaved lot between the Iao Theatre and our building (in which Maui Sporting Goods is a tenant) needs to be addressed. Right now, it provides  nearly two dozen precious, in-the-middle-of-things parking spaces.

When rebuilt, paved and made to conform to 21st century codes, at least 10 stalls will disappear, maybe more.

The area lost at least 23 when North Market was gentrified. In our view, we have gotten down to a point where 10 or 12 fewer spaces is a really big deal.

Don’t get us wrong. We support the minipark, for safety reasons. People we know have stumbled and fallen and been injured there.

But the history of the county’s work in the historic business district has been to promise more parking and then not deliver. Before the devastating rebuilding of North Market, the business owners and managers were promised that before North Market was to be taken in hand, something would be done.

That something was prominently to be a parking garage on the municipal lot. Never happened. Nor did anything else.

People really do need parking. A big fraction of the activity in the area is governmental. The county’s own staff grows year by year, till it has overflowed the nine-story county building into the One Main Plaza building.

Those people don’t (for the most part) walk or bicycle to work. They drive. Then they park.

The Chinese used to practice a form of slow execution called the “death of a thousand cuts.” That’s what’s happening to business in Wailuku.

#mauitraffic #mauibudget #mauibusiness

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

 

 

New but old pawn shop guitar treasures

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OK, we love this essay  by Jol Dantzig at PremierGuitar.com, but nowhere does he tell what the prices of these “pawn  shop treasures” have gotten  to. Just that they are up.

Music to our ears.

The times are certainly a-changin’, with inexpensive department store guitars of the ’60s (like this vintage Danelectro) becoming highly collectible.

The times are certainly a-changin’, with inexpensive department store guitars of the ’60s (like this vintage Danelectro) becoming highly collectible.

The headline is:

Esoterica Electrica: Pawnshop Plywood Chic Comes of Age

It’s all about the collectibility — and even musical desirability — of cheap guitars from Sears and similar places. Dantzig says:

Additionally, economics have been shifting the landscape around us. The handmade, classic instruments made from old-growth woods have been steadily climbing in price since the 1970s, and modern recreations aren’t inexpensive either. It’s difficult to find a 1950s or ’60s instrument for a working musician’s wage unless you turn to student guitars from the likes of Silvertone, Harmony, and Kay. But wait, you say they’re making those guitars again? The “mystery wood” warriors of yesteryear have increased in value to the point where new production is viable.

Well, we learn something new everyday. Until reading this, our pawnbrokers would not have considered a ’60s-era Silvertone electric,  but now we know better. If you have one, we’ll make an offer and try to find it a good home with some impecunious bluesman or -woman.

#maui #maui music

Presidential diamonds

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At Kamaaina Loan, we like to say we never know what will come over the counter next. But we have never had a First Lady’s diamond tiara yet. The famous Rick Harrison at Gold and Silver Pawn has beaten us to it.

Mrs. McKinley wearing tiara (Photo from Akron Beacon Journal)

Mrs. McKinley wearing tiara
(Photo from Akron Beacon Journal)

The TV pawn superstar obtained a diamond tiara once worn by the wife of President McKinley.

He has offered to sell it at his price, $43,000, to the McKinley Museum in Ohio. Presidential museums and libraries are not tax-supported but depend on donations by (usually) supporters who backed the man in office.

That’s why money is being raised for a Barack Obama library — with Hawaii and Chicago expected to compete for the location — right now. But it is only in fairly recent times that  big political money has flowed into presidential libraries. There is nobody around now who backed McKinley, who was shot in 1900.

So the Ohio museum seems a bit dubious about whether it can come up with the $43,000.

What are we waiting for?

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There was a bill in the Hawaii Legislature this year that would have mandated electronic reporting of pawnshop transactions to police. At present, it is optional. There were a number of questions ab out how it would work in practice and the bill was deferred.

Electronic reporting at Kamaaina Loan is more advanced than this

Electronic reporting at Kamaaina Loan is more advanced than this

Instead the Department of Commerce and Consumer Affairs will form a working group to report to the 2016 Legislature. So far, so good.

One of the issues is the “hold period” for purchased or pawned items. The rationale behind a hold is that it gives citizens or police a chance to check dealers to see if they have received stolen items.

(Yes, from time to time citizens come by with circulars describing items they have lost in  burglaries, usually readily identifiable jewelry. Not often, but sometimes, there’s a match.)

In Maui County, the hold period for licensed secondhand dealers, like Kamaaina Loan, is 15 days. For pawns, 60 days. In theory, most people dealing in buying and selling secondhand goods ought to be licensed, but we don’t think most are. Inspections are lax to nil, except pawnshops, which are more closely regulated.

In other Hawaii counties, hold periods vary within the 15- to 60-day framework. But on the Mainland it can get much more complicated. How complicated, you ask?

The Brockton, Massachusetts, area may hold the record. Each community sets it own standard, ranging from no hold at all, to 10, 14, 21, 30 or (in a proposal in one community) 60 days.

burglar

While the amateur burglars may not keep that straight, it seems likely that the professionals know which towns have the least regulation.