Haggling with Pawn Shops (reality vs. myth?)

[Aspychata]

I read that show is totally scripted. I haven't gone into a pawn shop because their overhead is seriously going to cut into any deal l can make in buying or selling something.

Sometimes a private seller is a better way to go, but the amount of fraud going on now, makes it tougher. I was just buying a painting of a pet from a photograph for a gift recently through a marketplace forum, all of the sudden, my personal info was being requested. I completely backed out of the transaction. Went online, found a cheaper better alternative through Etsy.

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This Digital Prints item by PitturaPortraits has 6004 favorites from Etsy shoppers. Ships from United States. Listed on Jan 1, 2024

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I decided to go with this etsy purchase. I can't wait to see what the corgie pic will look like.

 

[Forest Cat]

LOL....not really. I've been to Las Vegas only once, and we didn't spend any time at all seeing much of anything there other than visiting with my cousin's best friend.

We do have a few pawn shops in Reno, but I can't say I've ever had a reason to visit one. As for the show "Pawn Stars", you have to keep things in perspective as with "reality" television in general. That what is portrayed or implied isn't entirely real...but often scripted to accommodate a television production and little else.

Though I have been in a legal marijuana dispensary here. That was quite interesting.

The most interesting, and crazy thing, I have seen on Pawn Stars, was a guy walking in with some gold jewelry. He tossed it on the counter and said he had some viking gold. I thought "yeah, right" and then I looked closer at it and one of the pieces really was a real gold viking necklace. 1000 years old. How that ended up in a pawn shop in Las Vegas, no one knows I think. Then the pawn shop guy said something about buying it for the gold price and melting it with some other gold. I then said I really hope he didn't do that, it should have been in a museum.

 

[Judge]

The most interesting, and crazy thing, I have seen on Pawn Stars, was a guy walking in with some gold jewelry. He tossed it on the counter and said he had some viking gold. I thought "yeah, right" and then I looked closer at it and it really was a real gold viking necklace. 1000 years old. How that ended up in pawn shop in Las Vegas, no one knows I think. Then the pawn shop guy said something about buying it for the gold price and melting it with some other gold. I then said I really hope he didn't do that, it should have been in a museum.

Not surprising. From what I understand, on occasion they've been burned quite badly in some transactions. Whether it is incorporated into the production or not. All those "experts" we see scrutinizing various customers and property they bring in may not always show up when the cameras aren't rolling. Where Rick, Corey or Austin mess up all on their own.

With the reality that Austin (Chumley) isn't as dumb as he looks for the show, and conversely neither Rick or Corey are always as sharp as they think they are.

 

[maycontainthunder]

The most interesting, and crazy thing, I have seen on Pawn Stars, was a guy walking in with some gold jewelry. He tossed it on the counter and said he had some viking gold. I thought "yeah, right" and then I looked closer at it and it really was a real gold viking necklace. 1000 years old. How that ended up in a pawn shop in Las Vegas, no one knows I think. Then the pawn shop guy said something about buying it for the gold price and melting it with some other gold. I then said I really hope he didn't do that, it should have been in a museum.

This is often the problem. The 'component' value is greater than it as a whole. I have a suspicion he referenced the gold value to try and get the price down. I bet they had collectors in mind for that necklace.

 

[Forest Cat]

Not surprising. From what I understand, on occasion they've been burned quite badly in some transactions. Whether it is incorporated into the production or not. All those "experts" we see scrutinizing various customers and property they bring in may not always show up when the cameras aren't rolling. Where Rick, Corey or Austin mess up all on their own.

With the reality that Austin (Chumley) isn't as dumb as he looks for the show, and conversely neither Rick or Corey are always as sharp as they think they are.

Saw something that was pretty funny, a guy that looked a little shady knocked on the window at 3am and wanted to sell a diamond encrusted Rolex watch... And then he pointed out that it was certainly not stolen. So that seemed legit. Nothing suspicious going on there.

 

[Judge]

Saw something that was pretty funny, a guy that looked a little shady knocked on the window at 3am and wanted to sell a diamond encrusted Rolex watch... And then he pointed out that it was certainly not stolen. So that seemed legit. Nothing suspicious going on there.

LOL....yup. Three likely possibilities:

1) It's a bogus Rolex. (Lots of them in circulation)
2) It's stolen property. The kind usually well documented between the owner, law enforcement and pawn brokers.
3) Another tourist who wants revenge on a "one-armed bandit" that robbed him blind.

 

[Neonatal RRT]

A popular TV show, Pawn Stars, out of Las Vegas, Nevada, US. So many people on there trying to sell "priceless and rare" items for top dollar. He gives them a fraction of what it's worth on the premise that he has to "find a buyer", "he's taking all the risk", "it might not go to auction for another year", etc.

 

[Forest Cat]

View attachment 95851

He gives them a fraction of what it's worth on the premise that he has to "find a buyer", "he's taking all the risk", "it might not go to auction for another year", etc.

And "it takes up floor space" and "I have to get it framed".

 

[Princess Viola]

Truth be told, I'm not bothered by them not buying objects for the full value of what they're worth. It is a business, after all, and if someone brings in an object worth $500 and they buy it for $500, how are they supposed to make money by selling it?

 

[MildredHubble]

The Pawn Stars series is all smoke and mirrors! There's two stores, a real one and a duplicate on a sound stage. They have the film crew waiting in the real store and when someone brings something interesting in they cut the cameras, do a deal and then move to the duplicate store. That's why the celebrities are never more than a phone call away!

I saw the Viking gold one too I think. As far as I remember the guy had bought it in a scrap gold collection in the UK. The UK seller had obviously no idea that it was a valuable artefact and if I remember correctly, quite a rare example.

I don't really like going to those sorts of stores. We have CEX here in the UK and that's a bit more pleasant and you can pick up some stuff that is still super useful but considered obsolete. I picked up several Apple Airport routers. Not the fastest things for sure, but they make it super easy to set up network storage. You have to use a little hack to set things up as Apple (surprise surprise) have deprecated the software you use to set them up. But they work great and you can share printers with them too!

 

[VictorR]

Truth be told, I'm not bothered by them not buying objects for the full value of what they're worth. It is a business, after all, and if someone brings in an object worth $500 and they buy it for $500, how are they supposed to make money by selling it?

Agreed - I think the pain point is that in the pawn / used goods / antique world, there are a lot of dealers who have a blanket low rate that they pay (e.g. 10-25%) and apply that to everything. And lots of time, the people selling have no idea what the fair market value (or approximation) is for what they have.

If one is being fair, on say a $500 item, a reasonable offer might be (of course approximate, and factors like location, market conditions, and potentially shipping costs come into play)...

$400-450 (80-90%) if it's something they can sell pretty much instantaneously with little hassle
$350-400 (70-80%) if it's something they can likely sell in a month or two
$300-350 (60-70%) if it's something they can reasonably sell within several months
$200-300 (40-60%) if it's something they might expect to hold onto for a year and/or likely would have to sell at a discount

And something that is anticipated to be a tough sell - a good dealer would often, rather than making an <33% offer, would usually decline to make an offer at all.

The percentages suggested would probably still be applicable to say $200 items, but $100 items, $50 items, and <$20 items would likely all have increasingly lower percentages to account for transaction costs.

 

[MildredHubble]

The issue with second hand stores is that they have to make enough profit to stay in business. If you are in the UK the Value Added Tax is applied to the retail price, not the profit. So if you were to buy an item you could only sell for a maximum of £500 and you paid £450 for it, you would pay around £110 VAT. So you would lose money.

Most of the time the formula second hand retail stores use is offer the customer half the second hand market value less VAT. So unfortunately they tend to offer less than 25% of the value an item was when new.

It sucks when you may have invested £1000 in a laptop and get offered around quarter of its value. No one is going to pay £1000 for a second hand laptop with a RRP of £1000. They want a significant saving and they usually only tolerate paying perhaps 50-60% of its value when new. If it's super desirable, then perhaps you can push the price up a little.

That's capitalism for you!

 

[VictorR]

The issue with second hand stores is that they have to make enough profit to stay in business. If you are in the UK the Value Added Tax is applied to the retail price, not the profit. So if you were to buy an item you could only sell for a maximum of £500 and you paid £450 for it, you would pay around £110 VAT. So you would lose money.

Most of the time the formula second hand retail stores use is offer the customer half the second hand market value less VAT. So unfortunately they tend to offer less than 25% of the value an item was when new.

It sucks when you may have invested £1000 in a laptop and get offered around quarter of its value. No one is going to pay £1000 for a second hand laptop with a RRP of £1000. They want a significant saving and they usually only tolerate paying perhaps 50-60% of its value when new. If it's super desirable, then perhaps you can push the price up a little.

That's capitalism for you!

I'm so used to the North American model (sales tax, if applicable, is added to the "sticker price") that I didn't think of how a VAT-inclusive "sticker price" in the European model would make things far worse for people selling their wares in Europe.

I suppose on the flip side, that would mean that a brand new £1000 laptop was really a £820 laptop to start with.

One quirk of sales tax in the United States and Canada is that there's lots of variation and seemingly random rules. New York State and New York City for example exempt clothing and footware priced under $110 from sales tax.

Some states (like Oregon) don't have state sales tax and so attract shoppers from nearby states (e.g. Washington, California) that do.

 

[Progster]

I don't like this haggling business. Recently I've been selling some things. I go online and work out what is a fair price for the item. Some people are ok and don't do haggling, will give you the asking price without quibble or offer a fair price, others want to bring you down. I now tell people supermarket rules, this is the price, it's a fair price and if you like it, take it, if not, someone else will buy it.

 

[MildredHubble]

I've seen some interesting responses from "Or Best Offer" listings on eBay. eBay tends to helpfully enable this feature without you asking for it when you list items on there, so I can to an extent, understand why people can be a bit funny about it.

About a year ago my dad was looking into the possibility of buying another car since his Passat, as is customary for VW vehicles these days, is a real pain to maintain.

He saw a car he was interested in but a little over what he had in mind to pay, so he sent an offer as allowed by the seller. The response he received was a very articulate- "U wan it by it".

There was several instances of this sort of thing. In a way, a quite useful way of filtering out knuckle dragging morons that you would prefer not to have to deal with, particularly when money is involved!

 

[Gerontius]

The value of second hand goods is incredibly subjective--it's what the market will bear.
Again with the typewriters mentioned earlier--they are "worth" more in spare parts, but due to the difficulty of generating demand for a bunch of spare parts, they are usually sold intact & entire for restorations. Same applies to a lot of items.
Also, haggling ascends to another level when you get barter involved.

 

[MildredHubble]

The value of second hand goods is incredibly subjective--it's what the market will bear.
Again with the typewriters mentioned earlier--they are "worth" more in spare parts, but due to the difficulty of generating demand for a bunch of spare parts, they are usually sold intact & entire for restorations. Same applies to a lot of items.
Also, haggling ascends to another level when you get barter involved.

Sometimes also a fairly run of the mill item can suddenly sky rocket in value if it appears in a popular TV show. Stranger Things catapulted Kate Bush's The Hounds of Love to stupid levels of value just recently! I paid £4 for a really pristine copy on vinyl about 10 years ago. For a while there, it was trending at over £300 on eBay!

If Stranger Things put an Underwood front and centre as a pivotal plot point for half a season, you could probably count on them spiking in value quite a lot!

 

[Gerontius]

Sometimes also a fairly run of the mill item can suddenly sky rocket in value if it appears in a popular TV show

Another case of this was the song, "Midnight, the Stars, and You" (Ray Noble & orchestra, Victor Records, 1934, vocals by Al Bowlly) -- used in the soundtrack for The Shining. I dare anyone to find a copy of that record that's affordable.
A case where someone did use an Underwood typewriter & destroy the affordability was in the anime Violet Evergarden, where the titular character uses an Underwood Four Bank Portable to work as some sort of scribe or something--It is hard enough to buy a decent portable already if they weren't going as basically weeb jewelry for cosplay props.

 

[Forest Cat]

Truth be told, I'm not bothered by them not buying objects for the full value of what they're worth. It is a business, after all, and if someone brings in an object worth $500 and they buy it for $500, how are they supposed to make money by selling it?

Yes, it's just that paying 60% or less of what something is worth, sometimes seems a little low. And sometimes the explanations for why it's low is more funny than true. But of course they have to make money, it's a business, no one expects them to pay full retail price for anything.

 

[Aspychata]

Sometimes l find someone on ebay just unloading and aren't asking the true value, though rare, it can happen.