Tales from a Pawn Shop: Our coin maven visits

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One event we at Kamaaina Loan look forward to each year is Dennis Ryan’s winter visit to escape the snows of his home in Albany, New York.

Dennis is a man of many parts. During his two months or so on Maui, he consults on archaeological digs, visits antique dealers (“They’re all disappearing” on Maui) and sorts through a year’s accumulation of strange and oddball coins and paper money for us.

He is also an expert in African art, works on the archaeology of the Erie Canal, and holds a master’s degree in Russian history — for which he wrote his thesis in French. There’s never a dull moment when Dennis is around.

Over the course of a year, the pawn shop accumulates bags and envelopes of hard-to-identify coins. Typically, we buy somebody’s collection based on one or a few valuable coins, and along with it comes a plastic bag of odds and ends.

We rely on Dennis to spot the unusual rarities in this pile of junk. This year, we presented him with a large shoebox of coins.

He’s still working his way through it, but so far this trip his prize find has been a J.F. Souza merchant token.

Souza had a shop on Luso Street in Honolulu. Shopkeepers in Territorial days would pass out brass tokens as advertising and promotions, or to use in slot machines, or sometimes as a form of store credit — like today’s gift card. (These tokens still exist; think of the Maui Trade Dollar.)

The token Dennis found — and it was in a jumble with a bunch of dross, so we don’t know where it came from — is not dated, but it must be from the earliest Territorial days around 1900, since the store credit it offers is for “half a cent.”

Metcalf and Russell’s “Hawaiian Money,” the standard reference, considers the Souza token among the most valuable of the island commercial tokens, along with the Lunalilo Home and St. Francis Hospital radio tokens — a generation ago, these were valued at $100. Recently, one sold for $150. Only the very first, the Hawaiian Gazette Co., and one or two other Hawaii tokens are rarer.

The Souza token is by no means the most valuable coin Dennis Ryan has rescued from the junk pile, but the reason we value his visits is not the money he finds. It is the stories.

Some of the interesting finds are worth nothing. Monday, for example, his eagle eye spotted a faked Liberty dime. He immediately noticed the bronze showing through the silver plate. At the end of each visit, Dennis accumulates a small stash of counterfeits and fakes.

About 99% of the shoebox was uninteresting coins: some contained enough silver to be worth melting down; some still pass current (you can spend them, if you’re in the right country); and some are worth from half a buck to a dollar to a collector. That accounts for about half.

The other half end up in the scrap metal pile.

Dennis Ryan sorts coins

 

 

 

 

 

 

Maui clout

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Twenty-five years ago, Maui County was riding high in the state Legislature. Mamoru Yamasaki was chairman of the Ways and Means Committee in the Senate, and Joe Souki was speaker of the House.

State government thought it was rich, because of $500 million a year in payments from Duty Free Shoppers, and the political word was that this would be the last time that Maui, or any Neighbor Island, would be so well placed to get state funding for local projects. Once the unusual combo of Yama and Joe ended their dominance, Oahu would take over.

And for a generation, so it seemed.

Then, one month ago, it looked like 1988 all over again. Well, almost. Souki was slated to be speaker again, after some years on the outs with Democratic House leadership. Yama had passed away, but young Shan Tsutsui would continue as Senate president.

Then Dan Inouye died. Brian Schatz was appointed to the U.S. Senate, and Tsutsui accepted an appointment to replace him as lieutenant governor.

So, although Maui County came within days of regaining its legislative clout, suddenly it dissolved.

Of course, DFS is out of the picture and the state no longer thinks of itself as flush. Gil Keith-Agaran, who is nominated to move up to the Senate; leaving a hole in the House leadership where he had a shot at majority leader.

So it remains to be seen how well Maui County will do in the jockeying for state funding, especially for CIP (capital) projects. Keith-Agaran notes that since the days of the Yama-Joe duo, the budget has been restuctured so that CIP is rolled into the overall spending program.

Maui County would dearly like to return to the days when the state picked up a big part of water, solid waste and sewage treatment obligations; but the outlook for that looks slightly less rosy than it did late in 2012. 

 

Torn limb from limb

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If it seems like there have been a lot more power outages since Thanksgiving than in a normal early winter, you’re right, there have been. Today alone, MECO reports outages in Molokai and Lahaina; and yesterday there were more power failures Upcountry.

Some of this is unavoidable. When winter comes, rain returns and salt spray that has built up deposits on insulators during the dry season (even, sometimes, well away from the ocean) becomes wet and “flashes over.” A program of washing down insulators can help but has never entirely eliminated this source of power outages.

Most outages this year, though, apparently are from falling limbs. Some of this is beyond MECO’s control. Today the county closed Piiholo Road because eucalyptus trees had blown down across the road.

However, MECO used to have an aggressive program to identify which trees would, within the next five years, grow big enough to be vulnerable to winds and likely to interfere with power lines. Lumberjacks went out and preemptively removed and reduced those trees.

It looks like MECO needs to ramp up that preventive maintenance.

The newest pawn on TV entry

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“Hardcore Pawn Chicago” has begun showing, in case you cannot get enough via the original Detroit-based “Hardcore Pawn” or “Pawn Stars.”

According to a story in the Chicago Tribune, Royal Pawn is in a tough neighborhood:

Royal Pawn Shop gets the occasional odd item, including a fake leg and dentures, but it’s the people who walk into the store that make the environment unpredictable. Wayne said the customers vary from crack addicts, gang members and mobsters to athletes (the Bulls’ Jimmy Butler visited in September), doctors and a priest who wanted to pawn a cross.

One thing about working at Kamaaina Loan, we don’t see a lot of mobsters. Maybe that’s why we don’t have our own show yet.

Tribune photo of Randy and Wayne Cohen

 

Gold’s good year

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Gold momentarily touched $1800 an ounce last year and is now trading under $1700, so it may come as a surprise that — taking 2012 as a whole — gold had its best year since 1920.

So reports Bloomberg News.

At Kamaaina Loan and Cash For Gold, we buy and sell gold. We do not predict whether it will be higher or lower next month or six months from now, because we just don’t know.

What we do know is that we offer you the best price you’ll find any day in the week.

Notice Bloomberg reports that some famous investors are betting gold to go up:

Investors from John Paulson to George Soros have a $140.6 billion bet via near-record holdings in gold-backed exchange- traded products after the Federal Reserve said Dec. 12 it would buy $45 billion of Treasury securities a month as of January, adding to $40 billion a month of mortgage-debt purchases.

That’s kind of funny reporting, because all last year Bloomberg was reporting the details of Paulson’s failed bet on Chinese trees, where his fund put hundreds of millions of dollars into what turned out to be imaginary forests.

Paulson got famous by making a spectacularly good guess about mortgage securities but it was just a guess.Maybe he’ll have better luck with gold. At least gold exists

 

More ‘Pawn Stars’ soap opera

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According to Fox News, “Pawn Stars” dumped Oliva Black because she was formerly a model at the Suicide Girls nude website.

Apparently, she still works at the pawn shop.

We are pretty sure Big Rich has never modeled for Suicide Girls.

When we auditioned for a reality TV show for Kamaaina Loan, we asked the

staff to sign model releases, but nude modeling was not on our minds.

‘License to Pawn’

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Our friend Rick Harrison, the star of “Pawn Stars,” has a book out, called “License to Pawn.” Can the Rick Harrison bobblehead doll be far behind?

If you follow the link you’ll come to an 8-minute interview with Rick plugging his book. But he also is given a chance to debunk some of the myths and legends about pawn shops and pawn brokers.

One is that pawn shops prey on desperate gamblers in Las Vegas who have tapped out. Harrison says 90% of his customers redeem their pawns in good times, and even now, when times are far from good in Vegas, 80% do.

That matches Kamaaina Loan’s experience, and also tracks surveys of pawn shops across the country.

Most people use pawn shops like people with bank accounts use banks — to move money in and out according to their need for cash from day to day. But because up to 25% of Americans do not have a bank account, “alternative lenders” like pawn shops are how they do it.

Do you find it hard to believe that one American in 4 does not have a bank account? Survey after survey finds this to be a fact, and it has not varied a whole lot over at least the past 40 years.

Another point Harrison makes is that he has 22,000 items in his warehouse, all one-of-a-kind. It makes for inventory-taking nightmares. But for customers, the lesson is, if you see a bargain at a pawn shop, grab it.

 

Another Craigslist catastrophe

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Via our friends at Jaxpawn, a story

A lonely place to meet a stranger

about a Craigslist encounter that went horribly, fatally wrong.

We worry about people who agree to sell gold through Craigslist. And this story — although it involved an ATV, not gold — is why. Inviting strangers to your house to buy your gold; or agreeing to meet a stranger in a remote place displays a trust in human nature that is not really justified.

Better, we think, to sell your gold jewelry at an established store where security measures are in place.

Besides, you’ll get just as good a deal, or better, from any pawnshop.

A new era for pawn shops in China

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According to this article in China Daily Europe, pawn shops are modernizing in China. In China, you can pawn wine. That’s something American pawnbrokers haven’t gotten into.

What the article does not say is that Chinese banks are very dubious affairs. No wonder small businesses prefer the direct and simple convenience of dealing in pawn — especially when Chinese pawnbrokers will lend on real estate, cars and other goods that most American pawnbrokers would not consider.

One example from the story:

Wang Qinghong, the owner of a small company based in Tianjin that makes drinking straws, is a typical customer. Last month a supplier pushed forward the date of a down payment and Wang had to raise all the money within two days.

“At first the bank was the only lender I could think of, but it would have taken at least a week to get a loan from the bank,” Wang says.

The pawnshop, by contrast, was able to give him money in a few minutes after having verified that he owned a flat

 

Good bread for everybody

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Lots of people are posting fond memories of Jose Krall, the baker and pastry cook at Maui Bake Shop & Deli, who is missing since his plane crashed Saturday. Here is our favorite.

Jose’s productions were first-rate and priced accordingly. A strawberry dressed up in a tuxedo made of dark and white chocolate, for example, cost about $3. The exception was his baguettes, the bread that is the staff of life for the French.

When a sort of imitation baguette was available at local supermarkets for $3 or so, a genuine, crusty, hard baguette from Jose cost just $1.25. I once asked him why his baguettes were so cheap when his other loaves were priced around $6. I cannot recall his exact words, but the gist was:

“Everyone should be able to afford to eat good bread.”

In his old shop, before his brief retirement, he had a poster that read, in French, “In his (the baker’s) hands, the essence of good bread.” Jose Krall was a master baker who took his craft seriously. He walked the walk.

Jose Krall, picture from The Maui News