Your personal info and us

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OK, this is a little bit inside baseball,  but in the age of digital promiscuity, everybody should be interested in who gets their personal data and why.

A chain of New York pawnshops is suing the New York police for $61 million in a dispute about a national pawn reporting database.

According to the New York Post, the cops want to force the pawnshops to hand over their customer information to a company called LeadsOnline.

Gem’s owners say they stopped using the Texas-based LeadsOnline because they feared the service violated federal privacy laws, which they are required to follow.

 

At Kamaaina Loan, we’re concerned, because the Honolulu police have been trying to persuade the state Legislature to force island pawnshops to also participate in a national database (the big ones are LeadsOnline and BWI).

Long before Leads or BWI, Kamaaina Loan set up the first Internet reporting service, which lets Maui police see what items we have taken in on a pawn loan or a sale. The local cops can match this list with any information they have about stolen goods.

If there’s a hit, the police can 1) come pick up the allegedly stolen goods; and 2) find out the name, address, phone number, driver license number (or other ID), and thumbprint of the person we obtained it from.

This is, we believe, a useful protection for honest customers and for ourselves.

But we are very worried about what happens if some national or international ” big data” company is given access to our records. They won’t say what they do with the data. Who they sell or give it to. Or why.

We believe our sales records should go to the local police. It’s required by state law. But we don’t think it should go any further.

Other pawnbrokers, like Gem in New York, agree.

 

Pawn 101: Stupid pawnbroker tricks

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According to the Newport News (Virginia) Daily Press, a local pawnbroker was caught accepting stolen goods.

In a sting operation, police used an ringer to present items in “plastic security boxes.”

Maui retailers don’t seem to have adopted these, but they are the jewelry store equivalent of those plastic security tags that clothing stores attach to clothes to discourage shoplifters.

The Virginia pawnbroker was buying items in security boxes that had not been unlocked. That’s not in itself illegal, but it ought to have made him suspicious.

During the 2012 investigation, Newport News Police Detective W.E. Nesbitt indicated in the criminal complaint that he learned Pellecchia takes suspected stolen items brought in through the pawn shop to his home to sell on eBay.

The suspect wasn’t actually charged with receiving stolen property but with failure to keep pawn records. He maintains his innocence.

As we often say at Kamaaina Loan blog, a pawn shop is a stupid place to fence stolen goods, because you have to leave your name, address, picture and thumbprint. By the same token, if you’re going to accept stolen goods, setting up a pawn

Pellecchia

shop is a stupid way to do it, because most cities or states (including both Hawaii and Virginia) require pawnbrokers to keep complete records of what they buy or accept as collateral, and, in Hawaii, police can inspect the records without notice.

Mr. Pellecchia may not have know that, because the newspaper reported his business experience was in selling pizza.

 

The TAT kabuki

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Every year for the past two decades, the state Legislature considers whether to appropriate all or part of the counties’s share of the Transient Accommodations Tax. This is the tax imposed on visitor rooms, and it’s a virtually universal way that attractive destinations have to soaking tourists.

Hawaii’s TAT rate of a little over 9% is actually on the low side.

Still, because tourism makes up such  big part of our economy, the total take of TAT forms the second biggest fraction of Maui County’s government income, after property tax.

This year, in a newish wrinkle, the Legislature is also making noises about appropriating the utility franchise tax that has always gone to the counties. In an editorial, The Maui News called this piracy.

It is that, but it is also a form of kabuki, highly stylized theater. Every year, the four mayors rush to Honolulu to demand that the state keep its mitts off the county TAT money. As The Maui News said:

 

 

Last week, Mayor Alan Arakawa and County Council Chairwoman Gladys Baisa were at the Legislature testifying against SB 359, which is this year’s version of “Let’s Steal The Counties’ Shares” of the transient accommodations tax. A Friday story in The Maui News said the TAT is Maui County’s second largest revenue source at $20 million to $25 million.

Write, phone, text, email or send a smoke signal to our state legislators and tell them to stop these attempted raids on county budgets.

State and county governments are supposed to cooperate to solve problems. Constituents need to remind our state legislators they expect a partnership – not a looting of county coffers.

 

This may be the year, but never yet has the Legislature actually done much about grabbing the TAT money. What is really going on is that the Oahu-centric legislators make scary noises about grabbing the TAT, panicking the mayors, who then expend all their efforts during the short legislative session defending the TAT, rather than using their time to ask the state for help for their local issues.

This allows the Oahu senators and representatives to go ahead with their own local schemes without questioning from those pesky Neighbor Islanders.

This happens because of the big imbalance in size between state and any county, even the City and County of Honolulu. Losing the TAT would be a huge blow to a county, but picking up the few tens of millions would hardly show up in the multi-billion-dollar state budget.

 

 

If that’s a 4-foot-long catfish, we must be in Indiana

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An Indiana pawn shop has started a reality TV show about itself for local cablevision.

Early submissions were a large stuffed catfish and a phony check not written, as claimed, by George Washington. Sounds interesting.

In case you’re wondering about the reality pawn show that Kamaaina Loan auditioned for in October, things are progressing. The “sizzle” (TV lingo for a short sampler used to try to interest producers in watching a longer pilot show) has been turned down by several networks but not all. Several appointments are scheduled in the next few weeks to keep hunting for a home.

We had a great time meeting folks who brought their unusual treasures to us for our sizzle to promote a Maui pawn reality show

No, no, no, not that kind of stuffed catfish

and are grateful no one asked us to place a value on a stuffed catfish ($450 in Indiana). A stuffed marlin we could have dealt with.

A more elevated view

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Funny thing how climbing the county building from the eighth to the ninth floor changes the view so much.

Mayor Alan Arakawa has an excellent summary in The Maui News about “Now is the time to fix the water system.” As this blog noted in February, we should welcome water rate increases, because the time to have begun fixing what ails the Department of Water Supply is not now but years and decades ago.

For all that time, the County Council wouldn’t raise rates to levels sufficient to maintain the system. And Mayor Alan Arakawa was no different from the rest of the council in that respect.

Now he has got religion, and a good thing, too. It also appears that at least some other members of the council are coming around to the understanding that the water system doesn’t repair itself.

Right now, I get all the water I can use delivered to my house for less than the cost of a can of soda each day, so even a doubling of water rates isn’t going to break the banks of any but the destitute.

It may help, too, that the department has moved to monthly billing. We’ll have to write twice as many checks but for half as much each, which should ease the sticker shock.

For a generation at least, Maui County has had the lowest water rates in the state. It is not something to be proud of.

 

 

 

Pawn 101: We buy (almost) anything

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So when a customer walked in with a box of old cannon balls and shells, Kamaaina Loan shelled out, so to speak.

Old ordnance has collectible value, but it takes an expert to identify the many varieties.

The collection we have is from the Civil War period and includes a Parrott shell (which was used in a cheap cannon that had a tendency to explode), some round shot and a mortar bomb filled with Minie balls (which are not balls but cylinders) rather than the usual round grapeshot.

As collectibles, cannon balls have the advantage of not needing gentle handling, unlike, say, Meissen china. On the other hand, shells, if filled with powder, can be dangerous. All ours are either solid cast iron or disarmed, so no worries.

In a pawn shop, you never know what will come through the door next.

 

Funny, we get along with the hair salons

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From the Des Moines Register, a story about a suburban enclave that denied a business application from a pawn shop, in part because the owner of a hair salon in the same strip mall said

“I think my clientele will be intimidated. A pawn shop is not curb appeal. That’s intimidation.”

Perhaps the people of Windsor Heights are unusually skittish. Kamaaina Loan has peacefully co-existed with Stephanie’s Hair Salon for over 35 years and with Lori’s Hair Shack for over 25 years.

If Mindy Schmitt only knew it, many of her stylists and many of her customers go to pawn shops. Kamaaina Loan’s customer base includes about 10% of the population of Maui, and this is not unusual.

The pawn shop owner announced he would appeal to the local district court (the Iowa equivalent of Hawaii’s circuit court). He will almost certainly win if he does.

 

Why we should welcome water rate increase

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Alan Arakawa has got religion when it  comes to water rates. When he was on the County Council, he, along with all the other members, thought it best to keep water rates as low as possible. So when the semi-autonomous Board of Water Suppply (as it then was) came in with requests, the council would take pride in holding rates down.

As a result, the water system deteriorated.

It’s a rule of thumb that businesses ought to spend about 3% of the value of their physical plant in maintenance each year. More if you’re an airline, maybe. The reasoning is that most things you own last about 30 years.

Cars don’t last that long, but water pipelines last 50 years or more before needing to be replaced.

So if your water system is worth around a billion dollars — which is a fair guess at the value of Maui’s public system — you should be spending $30 million, give or take, just on replacing and repairing your pipes, trucks, treatment plants, computer systems etc.

In recent years, the department has spent at that rate, or better, but for decades and decades, the entire operating budget hardly equaled 3% of the value of the plant. So there’s lots of catching up to do.

Whether the 5% rate increase the mayor called for in his State of the County message is the right amount is up for discussion, but at least the necessity for greater spending on maintenance is getting through to the ninth floor. It will be interesting to see whether the eighth floor gets it.

Been there, done that

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From the Gainesville Times.com, a story about a new ordinance that requires pawn shops to take a picture and fingerprint of customers pawning or selling items, and to make a daily electronic report to the local police.

“We have already begun seeing results that are a direct correlation to this ordinance,” police spokesman Cpl. Kevin Holbrook said.

 

The idea is to make it harder to fence stolen goods.

It’s not a new idea. In fact, Kamaaina Loan was the first pawn shop in the country to make electronic reporting available. For Kamaaina Loan, it was voluntary. Our custom software, pawnreport.com, has for more than 10 years provided Maui police a registry of every item we take in.

Unlike years ago, officers don’t have to come down in person with lists of stolen goods. They can survey our warehouse from their offices.

In Hawaii, pawn brokers and secondhand dealers are required by law to take fingerprints and copies of identification (usually a driver’s license) from sellers. It’s a law that is widely disregarded, especially by secondhand dealers.

They are not required to make electronic registries of purchases or pawns available to police.

You, the customer, should deal only with dealers who do demand ID and thumbprint.

Only the most ignorant of criminals try to fence stolen goods at our pawn shop. If their victim has filed a police report, and we have the goods, then we also have the name, address, photograph and fingerprint of the criminal.

Police love it when that happens. It makes their job so much easier.

SCOTT ROGERS/The Times
Pappy’s Pawn owner Gus Marroquin, right, helps Alejandro Serrano with the purchase of a smartphone at the Browns Bridge Road pawnshop.

 

Pawn 101: The most common bad news

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According to examiner.com, the most common bad news answer that the Pawn Stars stars give to customers is:

 “The customer’s ‘Sterling Silver’ flatware is actually plated.”

At Kamaaina Loan, the most common answer the customer doesn’t want to hear is probably, “Not for me.”

And it probably applies more to tools or electronic equipment than to flatware.

The deal is, it doesn’t make sense for a pawnbroker to lend money on (or purchase) anything that doesn’t have a ready resale value. “Ready” is a relative term. For collectibles and art, a ready market might take years to develop.

For power tools, which we see a lot of, a ready market means turnover in weeks, or at most a few months.

For electronic equipment, stuff that still works perfectly might not be worth a dime — games and game players from a couple of years ago usually have very small value in the market, if any. Older cellphones are another item that depreciates fast because newer models keep pushing them into the background.

The market is what it is. We don’t do much in the fur coat line, because who on Maui would we sell a fur coat to? On the Mainland, the coat might do better.

Plated silverware is usually (but not always) practically worthless, because the film of silver is so thin. Underneath is scrap iron, worth a penny a pound.

But you have to check. There are a few (very few in the case of plated eating utensils) models that have collectible value.

Which is why the No. 1 all-time response we give to customers who call is, “Bring it in.”

Until we see it and handle it and examine it, we cannot put a value on it.

We can tell you what silver is worth — $30.82 cents an ounce in New York as this is typed, but that’s for Comex-deliverable silver, which is a strange beast of great purity. Sterling is silver mixed with other metals (for durability), so it is worth less.

But a silver dollar — even if it is a Susan B. Anthony silver dollar without any silver in it — it always worth a dollar.