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.
The Sun-Sentinel plays the story straight. HuffingonPost rewrites it with one of the more obvious joke lines. But it isn’t funny.
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.
Last week, a young man came into Kamaaina Loan with a “diamond” in his hand, and another one in his ear.
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.
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.
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.”
Some people will go to quite a bit of trouble to steal a measly $7,446.
Like the guy who made up 866 fake one-ounce silver bars and encased them in plastic.
Then, according to the Delco Times, he took them to a pawn shop outside Philadelphia, which incautiously accepted them as real without breaking open the plastic to test.
Not right away, anyhow:
“(Pawnbroker) Oblon told police he has purchased one-ounce silver bars from other customers in the same way in the past. . . .
Oblon became suspicious and broke open several randomly selected bars and tested them. The test showed the bars were not real silver, police said.
The story does not say what the fakes were made of. It is possible that even non-destructive testing could have detected them, although that would require breaking open the cases.
The Delco Times story does not say, but presumably the seller left his ID and address etc. with the buyer, which is required in many jurisdictions. At any rate, the pawnbroker knew where to find him in New Jersey.
It was a bad deal all around. The $7,446 paid for the fakes was only half what 866 ounces of real silver are worth among big dealers. Small dealers like coin shops and pawnbrokers buy at a discount, but a 50% discount is steep.
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.)
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.
A month ago, gold was trading at $1,175 an ounce. This morning, it is a bit over $1,290.
That’s a gain of about 10%, and, no, we didn’t see that coming.
So bring us your gold, and we will buy it or lend on it, and either way, we can offer you more than we could afford to a month ago.
Will it go down 10% over the next month? We have no idea but it’s risk we have to take to keep delivering financial help with aloha to Maui people, just like during all the swings up and swings down over the past 38 years.
#mauiloan #mauigold #mauiretail
The post below is copied from my other blog, Restating the Obvious Maui, at The Maui News. For Kamaaina Loan blog, the key point to add, if you are a borrower, is that pawn loans are “non-recourse loas, which means that if you do not repay, the pawnbroker can keep your collateral, but he cannot go after any of your other goods or income. He cannot ask the courts to make you pay.
And he does not report your default to a credit reporting agency. Something to think about if you have ever had trouble repaying a loan in the past.
* * *
The NY Times has a story about the New York attorney general going after corrupt practices of buyers of bad consumer debt. If you have consumer debt, it’s worth your time (and one of your 10 monthly Times looks if you are not a subscriber) to read.
When I say “going after,” I mean candy-assed sweetheart settlements, amounting to mere hundreds of thousands in frauds that appear to total billions. And no hint of sanctions against the lawyers involved for their culpability in perpetrating frauds upon the courts.
Eric Schneiderman is no Eliot Spitzer.
But unlike mortgage foreclosure lawsuits, consumer debt collection cases often play out far from public view, consumer lawyers say, because borrowers seldom show up in court to contest the suits.
As a result, an estimated 95 percent of debt collection lawsuits result in default judgments against borrowers, an automatic victory for the debt buyers that enables them to garnishee consumers’ wages or freeze bank accounts.
That’s half true. I’ve never seen a debtor show up at Circuit Court to contest a credit card collection action. There are typically 3 to 6 in a morning session. (These are usually suits by the lender not by a buyer of bad debt.)
But I’ve seldom seen anybody show up to contest a real estate foreclosure action either, at least in the years since the Crash of ’08.
In either case, very often the borrower has left Maui long before the lender goes to court.
(Style points to the Times copy editor for getting the correct verb — to garnishee, not to garnish.)
#mauiloan #mauipawn #mauiborrow #borrow
At Kamaaina Loan we look forward to 2015, because gold has got to have a better year than the one it just had.
Of course, we make loans and buy gold whether it is up or down, but like most people (bears excepted) we like the price to be up. That allows us to lend our customers more, or pay them more for their gold. They like that and we like it.
Gold started the year around $1230 an ounce. (The charts are available from Kitco.com.) In March it made a run up to $1380, but on the last day of the year it swooned, finishing at a disappointing $1182.
Well, it’s a new year and a fresh start and we wish you well and hope to see you sometime. We will deal for gold, however you want, and as always offer the best deals on the island, with aloha.
Hauoli makahiki hou!
Monday – Friday 9 am – 6 pm
Saturday – Sunday 10 am – 4 pm