I just wanted to point out that the Las Vegas valley is not even remotely flat, and is surrounded by both mountain ranges and canyons. I can think of about a thousand places where a Rokon would be fun that are less than 50 kilometers from the Pawn Stars shop.
This is possibly true. That or the people who are selling are largely locals to Vegas so asking them to come back the next week or sometime later to film the “expert” scene isn’t a big deal. OR they are found by the show (ebay, craigslist, antique mags) and know they have something interesting to sell. The show pays them an appearence fee on top of what they get from the store.
A good friend of my family was on the show (the leg irons and hand cuffs expert). He is based out of San Diego but on the show he was presented as one of Rick’s friends who he could call and just pop on down to the store to talk about the item.
re: The Rokon: Rick only buys what he thinks he can sell. He’s not a collector, he’s a businessman. I think he’s the only one on the show who doesn’t buy stuff for himself, which is why he’s in charge.
re: Chumlee: he’s a childhood friend of Big Hoss. Apparently, he’s the store’s in-house expert on pinball machines, which he demonstrated in the “Pinball Wizards” episode, Feb 8, 2010. Yep, I really want to see that episode too.
My question is what do the experts get out of coming to the shop. I’m sure they get some sort of payment, but the items aren’t very expensive, imho. The fair thing would be to give them a flat fee or cut of the sale, but I’m guessing all they get is free promotion of their respective shops. Restoration Rick might be the only one getting a good profit.
edit: Thanks for answering my question, Push You Down!
Well, yeah, if you go to the mountains it’s not going to be flat. And if you look hard enough, there are plenty of places you can ride a Rokon in downtown L.A. Las Vegas is ‘flat enough’ for a discussion about the Rokon.
It doesn’t take a lot of brains or industry knowledge to pay out and stack CDs, DVDs and other assorted sundry pawn items. Or to vacuum the floors and dust the cases. SOMEONE needs to do all that mundane shit. That someone is Chumley.
I got a laugh from last night’s episode when the Old Man bought the two western dummies (after first commenting that he doesn’t need any more dummies because he’s got enough working for him already). Later in the episode Rick starts yelling at his son for buying them, calling it the stupidest thing he’s ever done since he started working at the shop. His reaction when his dad tells him the he had bought the dummies was priceless.
He was yelling at Chumley. Big Hoss said he didn’t have anything to do with it.
I can believe that - the fees for selling on eBay and getting paid via Paypal are close to 20% now. Plus, there’s a significant investment of time to take pictures and write up listings, then more time to box it up and ship.
So is downtown Denver. Or downtown LA. Look, when you buy a jetski, do you bitch that there’s nowhere to ride it because you first have to go to the lake?
The place where they were riding it, and where they ride a lot of the vehicles on the show, is pretty flat. Yeah, there’s a gully. But it’s not really the terrain the bike was designed for.
I’ve seen it a few times, but it’s not like I look for it because they’re such rip-off artists.
I love it when their excuse for offering about 40% of what the latest expert claims an item is worth as being “Well, I have to store it until someone buys it…” Bullshit. There’s more than enough places to sell something these days with the internet giving wider exposure to sellers of anything.
Interesting situations in the past have been the barberchair that had to be “restored” – it went in with brown leather and came back in white. Sorry, but I’ve never seen a white barberchair. The other interesting one is when some guy came in with the rusted hulk of a Coke vending machine with no guts – just the outer casing really. He takes it to his buddy who “restores” vending machines, and after it’s restored, it’s a whole different model! And then there was the episode where they restored the Old Man’s '66 Chrysler Imperial and brought it back with a white interior instead of the black one it started out with – come on, I’m sure one can buy interior kits for a '66 Chrysler and get a basic black one easily.
Go figure.
I guess it’s easy to bullshit the vast viewing public.
That’s just completely wrong. The value of something at retail has absolutely nothing to do with its value at wholesale, and pawn shops buy at wholesale prices.
Selling an item on eBay or Craigslist? Sure. And if you’re a private individual, all it costs you is time. But Rick would have to pay someone to post the ad, to watch the auction, to respond to queries. He has to pay the person who packs it up and ships it out. In the meantime, every time someone comes in the store and asks questions about it, it costs someone time, and therefore money. And he’s taking up floor space with the item, which costs money, and he has capital tied up in it.
The economics of any sales business are completely different than the economics of a private sale. As an example, look up the street price of your current vehicle. Then take it to an auto dealer and see what they’ll give you for it. You’ll be shocked at how low the offer is if you haven’t done that before.
I find Rick to be more than fair - at least in the dealings on camera. Many times he’ll bring in an expert who values something much higher than the customer had already asked for, and Rick pays him more.
I actually think the ability to price objects and choose what to buy and what to sell is a highly developed skill. These guys not only have to know what something’s worth, but they have to have a sense of the cost of money, the intangible costs I mentioned, the level of demand for the objects to know how long they’ll have to hold it, etc. They have to factor into their offer things like how much space the object takes up, how much restoration it needs, and how much that might cost, etc. And they also have to keep in mind their own image and whether the product fits the kind of merchandise they want to be known for selling.
And Rick and the old man seem to be very good at it.
One large aspect of the pawn industry the show barely touches on is the loan/pawning aspect, and this is probably where these guys make most of their money. It’s a touchy subject, because pawn shops charge high interest rates - As high as 30-50% per year, plus fees to do the initial pawn, and if you don’t return for your item when your contract is up, they get to keep it (and have typically loaned you only a small fraction of its value).
Say you have a $3,000 guitar. You want a loan against it. Rick might loan you $1000. You sign a contract saying that you’ll collect the guitar in two months, at which time you agree to pay $1100. In addition, there might be a one-time fee of X to handle the transaction.
This is a no-lose proposition for the pawn broker. All he has to do is store your guitar for two months, and he makes $100 on $1000. And if you don’t show, then after a suitable amount of time the item reverts to the pawn shop, and they bought a $3,000 guitar for $1000.
And generally, people don’t haggle too hard when pawning an item because they’re often desperate or because they expect to buy it back. In fact, they may ask for significantly less than what it’s worth, so they don’t have to pay the interest on money they don’t really need. But stuff happens, and maybe they ran out of money and can’t get more. Bye bye guitar. Apparently, 20-30% of all pawned items are never reclaimed.
That’s got to be a real cash cow for these guys.
They keep Chumlee around because when Rick buys an authentic 18th century blunderbuss that may or may not explode upon firing and take your arm off with it, they need someone to fire that test shot.
I don’t know. I get the feeling that most of the people coming in (who are worth filming) are there because they think they have some specialty item that Rick will fall in love with. I don’t think your average pawn shop sees many manuscripts by Abe Lincoln.
Nah, they keep him around because, like Mikey on American Chopper, he’s good TV. If he was a boring grinder who showed up and did his job, he wouldn’t be on the show. That shop has a lot of employees - you see them wandering around in the background of various shots quite a bit - but Chumlee is the one who gets the airtime. That actually makes him really valuable to Rick and the Old Man.
I’m often revolted by the sheer greed of the people selling.
Granddad dies. Grandson finds his most prized possession in the attic. He doesn’t give a shit how much it meant to his granddad. Sells it to Rick for a few hundred bucks. Then the little snot probably blows it at a blackjack table.
Why? Just because it meant a lot to Granddad doesn’t mean it means shit to anybody else. The dude’s dead. His opinion matters no longer.
Put it all on 26 Black.
You’re preaching to the choir here, Sam. I owned a collectibles store back in the days before the internet (1990-92), and yes, “storage”/carrying something on inventory and having to worry about whether it would sell was definitely a consideration then.
If we had had access to the Internet back then, we could have easily listed anything that wouldn’t sell in a reasonable time, or even buy things that we knew wouldn’t sell locally but could sell online. It would have been a great way to turnover stuff.
Today, because of the internet, the “storage”/carrying something in inventory that won’t sell just doesn’t ring true. Pay someone to write up ads? Seems to me that there is no shortage of people working in the store on Pawn Stars who could easily be put to work doing this. There is no reason to incur “intangible” costs of the magnitude you mention these days.
I was wondering about this just the other day, when I watched an episode in which a trucker pawned his truck, which had an approximate resale value of $90K, for $20K. Of course, if you somehow are 100% certain that you’ll have the money to buy it back, then you should pawn it for the minimum amount that you need, while if that’s extremely unlikely and you’re just holding out hope you should pawn it for the maximum.
Now, if it were me, I’d look at the interest rate and my own conservative estimate of the likelihood that I’d be able to come up with the money to buy back the item, then do an expected value calculation. Really, though, that would mostly be for fun, because unless the interest rate is extremely high, the multiplier on the eventuality that you won’t have the money and will thus lose your entire investment (less the amount you pawned it for) would quickly start to dwarf the extra interest you’d pay taking a max-pawn. Selling a $90K truck for $20K is a mathematical catastrophe, a worst-case scenario that’s so bad it should dominate your analysis, even if it happens rarely. Probably, if you’re pawning an item you should almost always pawn it for a little bit less than the maximum amount you can get away with.
A possible mitigating factor would be if you have reason to believe that the extra interest incurred by an unnecessary max-pawn is the thing that will cause you to be unable to buy back your item. Presumably this possibility is generally remote, but if you have a pretty good idea of what your financial situation will be like when the note comes due, and you know that it’s going to be a close call, this would be an important factor to consider. In this case you really would want to do an EV calculation.
this show shows the pawn shop guys as the scum they are, ripping people off all day long. its a travesty