pawn shop questions
-harlequin- does not know what he/she is talking about. They said: From my limited experience, to work out in advance how much they should offer, look at how much they are selling similar items for, and halve it. This is nonsense. The markup on Pawn Shop items varies greatly, but you’re lucky to get 1/10th for what your item is selling for on the floor. don’t think of it as a loan. Unless you’re back in a few hours, your stuff may get sold. Wrong again. Pawn shops don’t want to sell your crap. They want to keep in the back in hock while you come in and make the minimum payment necessary to keep them from putting it on the floor. Usually this means you go in and pay just the interest on your loan. some places are not interested in loans, just merchandise I don’t know what those places are, but they sure as hell ain’t pawn shops. Pawn shops make only a tiny, tiny percentage of their money from retail sales. The vast majority of their profit comes from people using them as a bank.
Okay…lots of questions…I am a pawnbroker. I get calls all day from people claiming that someone stole their stuff and want to know if their items are in my shop. First of all, I am bound by law to not give ANY information reguarding a loan. I cannot tell you a name, the day, the amount, the item, not a thing. I cannot even tell you if I have accepted a certain item on a loan. It’s a confidentiality issue. What I CAN tell you is that you need to file a police report. I send a report every week to a detective at the police department (whose only job is to track stolen items through pawn shops…every county has at least one pawn detective) this report contains my customer’s names, all the info on their driver’s license and a physical discription of them, along with the items they pawned and how much they got a loan for. We record items very accurately just for the purpose of IDing stolen property. If the item has a serial number, a scratch, what color it is….so, for you, the better
