He stated in the show he bought it for his rec room and has no intentions of selling it. You don’t need a liquor license to sell stuff like that as a collectible, you are selling the box and bottle, the booze is free. I bought a bunch of Jack Daniels stuff, all with unopened bottles and had no issues selling it all on eBay. There is a difference between selling booze for consumption and selling the packaging as a collectible.
I can’t imagine anyone bringing anything worth more than 5 grand to a pawn shop. The ones around here would laugh you out the door.
Some guy brought in a Massachusetts penny made by Paul Revere. Thought he’d get $100k. Seriously? He really thought some guy in a pawnshop has that kind of money to tie up? Yeah right. It was fake anyhow and worth nothing.
My favorite is when the expert tells them what it’s worth…and the seller immediately wants MORE than it’s worth. (Like the fake leg from the Civil War that was worth 1,000. The guy immediately asks for 7,500. :rolleyes:)
This is a perfect “yes and no” type of answer to your statement. I’m guessing you’ve never pawned anything? It’s a common mistake to assume that when people pawn (as opposed to selling) an item that they want the maximum amount for it. That just isn’t true. As an extreme example (for easier illustration) think of a title loan place; which is basically a pawn shop for cars. Using your title as collateral, they give you money on a high interest loan. The more you borrow, the more you have to pay back with a very high interest. If I’m only $100 short on rent this month, I might get a title loan for only $100. It’s easier to pay back $130 than it is to get a loan for $10,000 and pay back $13,000. I’m making up the interest rates as I have no idea what the current loan rates are at a pawn shop. In my experience the pawn amount is somewhat close to the purchase amount. If the pawn goes bad, he’s selling it either way. HOWEVER, One reason the max loan value could be lower than the sell value is that it has to sit in inventory until the pawn goes bad before he can sell it.
Our policy was that we didn’t care if you pawned or sold, the price was the same. Sitting on an item for 2 months didn’t bother us at all. The only reason that we asked was so that we’d know which paperwork to fill out. Most people, I’d guess well over 95%, wanted to pawn their items for as much as they could.
What cracks me up is how people seem to go in there to get a fair deal. It’s a pawn shop people! Their entire business is about buying cheap and reselling things somewhat cheap. As a pawn shop owner you have the upper hand just by a person walking into your store; because by doing that you’re saying “hello, I need some instant cash, and I can’t wait around to sell this on craigslist.”
That’s always been my experience, but sitting in inventory was the only possible reason I could think of the price being different.
Ahh you edited! So, Nars why do you think that was? What was the ratio of pawns that were paid off vs the ones that never were? Do you think people had intentions of picking their item up? Do you think they just wanted the ‘chance’ to pick it up in case they came into money? It’s always been my assumptions that most everything that comes into a pawn shop leaves under a different owner.
Why do I think what was? That people pawned for as much as they could or that anyone would sell to a pawnshop? I think that subconsciously, people might have thought that they would get more by selling. When we start the conversation, “Do you want to pawn it or sell it?” the customer doesn’t know that the price will be the same. Contrary to Pawn Stars, or at least how it appears on TV, the vast majority of our work was in pawns. IIRC (from 25 years ago), we’d average about 30 pawns and 3 purchases a day. Almost every customer would insist that they were going to pick up their pawned goods. I think that they thought that we would give them more if they told us that they would be back. Sorry. It doesn’t work that way. Your item’s value is not related to your intentions.
In our store, owners picked up their merchandise about 75% of the time. We had many customers that would pawn the same items over and over again.
Once, we had a customer that had pawned his toolbox more times than I could count. We knew him on sight and he knew all of us. We didn’t even bother with a description of his tools on the pawn ticket. The last time that we saw him, we didn’t check his contents. We almost never did. His toolbox eventually came up for sale and when we looked inside, all that it was was a box of rocks. We learned to be less trusting of people even though we had already made plenty of money in interest off of him. As was mentioned up thread, the rate was 10% per month. The kicker was that you had to pay for the entire first month’s interest even though you might redeem your pawn ticket a week after making the pawn. The second month was pro-rated daily interest. After 60 days, if no interest payments were made, it was ours.
No kidding! I love the people that storm out, full of rage. Dude, you didn’t go to an antique WHATEVERYOU’REPAWNING dealer, you went to a freaking pawn shop. If you want to make maximum money, get an auction house to handle your extremely rare antique or try to privately sell whatever it is you have. Don’t take it to a middle man who will have to make a freaking profit.
Anyways, isn’t the pawn business better than the buying stuff business?
Sadly, I’ve known more than a few people with a non-existent grasp of Economics who might think this is perfectly reasonable. If it was pointed out that the shop could only sell it for $1,000, they’d say “Who cares? That’s not my problem. I want my $7500!” Then spend years bitching about how the store was trying to rip them off by refusing to pay them that kind of money.
An outlandish request is usually followed by “I don’t want to sell it. I’m going to come back and get it.”
They do it at auctions for the most part. He’s always talking about the listing fees involved.
Isn’t there a name for this? Let’s say you want to buy something used. They want X, so you immediately offer 1/2 X. Therefore, if they say I want to buy something for Y, they immediately say 2Y.