Fat, drunk and happy

Nothing would disturb this bumblebee who had passed out in the blossom of a night-blooming cereus

$35,000 parking spaces

Least surprising local news of the week is that the county will not proceed with making the Wailuku Municipal Parking Lot a multi-story garage, at a cost of $35,000 per stall gained.
That’s right. The parking spot would cost more than the car parked in it.
This is usual. When I worked in Des Moines, Iowa, the city built a series of multistory parking garages downtown, and each stall cost roughly twice what a new car cost in those days. The garages charged 35 cents an hour to park, and, remarkably, that was sufficient revenue to pay off the bonds. (In Des Moines, they used something called “tax increment financing,” which was a form of betting on the come – the bonds were supported by the expected increase in property taxes that was to come about when the garage made surrounding property more valuable; the parking lot equivalent of trickle-down economics. It worked, in the sense that the bonds did not default. It did not work, in the sense that the city was trying to revitalize downtown. People did not decide to forgo free parking at the suburban malls in order to pay 35 cents to park downtown.)
Should a Wailuku multistory garage get built, and should it be required to be self-supporting, presumably it would have to charge in the neighborhood of 75 cents an hour. Since the municipal lot is used largely by workers who park without charge, I do not see them welcoming the opportunity to pay $6 a day to park.
It shouldn’t have required an environmental impact statement to figure this out.
There’s a reason multistory garages are uncommon. They are ridiculously expensive. Only resorts, whose land is even more ridiculously expensive, have them; and Queen Kaahumanu Center.
At Kaahumanu Center, the owners (at the time, ML&P) wanted to retain their standing as the primo mall on the island, because of a rule of thumb in the mall business that the No. 1 mall enjoys an 8% premium in revenue over lesser malls. Unable to grow out, Kaahumanu Center had to go up, making itself two stories and adding two very expensive parking garages.
As it turned out, it didn’t work, for several reasons. One, Duncan McNaughton built a loooong strip mall along Dairy Road and placed in it a lot of stores that normally you’d find in the local dominant mall, like Sports Authority. Two, because Maui is a tourist island, Shops at Wailea and Whalers Village scarfed up the high-end retailers like Coach that normally you’d find at the local primo mall.
But Shops at Wailea did not become the local primo mall because it doesn’t have the stores that draw people to the dominant mall for their day-to-day shopping – no Macy’s or equivalent.
As often happens, Mainland rules don’t apply here.
Wailuku is certainly congested, but it is not obviously a place to put expensive parking: In general, it has the lowest commercial rents around.
So parking is likely to remain a pain in Wailuku. The only old city I have been in where no-charge parking downtown is not a pain is Savannah, Georgia. It was founded as a military colony and the original layout set aside every sixth block or so for militia training grounds.
Remarkably, these were not poached for development even after militia uses receded. As a result, there are miles of empty block fronts where cars can park a short distance from the built-up blocks where people want to go. It’s awfully expensive in land, but it works.
Lucky for Kamaaina Loan & Cash for Gold, we have our own private parking (it’s behind our retail store at 98 North Market Street).

Pawn 101: HIgh value pawns

At Bloomberg News, there’s a interview at Borro, a London pawn shop that brags it services the well-to-do. The owner says, “Where else can you get 50,000 pounds” on the same day?

Well, actually, you could do that at Kamaaina Loan, except we deal in dollars not pounds.

A $50,000 pawn is not that unusual. On Maui with its population of 150,000, we don’t do as many $50,000 loans as Borro might in London, with its population of over 10 million.

But a $50,000 loan is very doable, if you have the collateral. A couple of Rolexes might d — we have customers who have more than a couple of Rolexes.

We have lately opened a private transaction room to handle these big loans, and also to make it more convenient to do estate appraisals, which take some time.

But a $50,000 pawn loan? That doesn’t have to take much longer than a $50 pawn loan.

Call 242-5555 to make an appointment for your $50,000.

Don’t buy that iPhone now!

So say the tech gurus, because (unconfrmed) rumors have it that the iPhone 5 will be out in a month.

In the past, that has meant that the older models (which remain available) drop sharply in price: to $0 if you are willing to sign a 2-year contract, sometimes.

Whether the rumor is accurate or not, retailers have started dropping the price of the iPhone 4S.
For you as an iPhone carrying pawn customer, what this means is that you will not be able to borrow as much on your phone from now on.

Smartphones are a very popular pawn item. It must be hard to part with your phone, but, hey, sometimes you gotta get a bridge loan to eat or pay rent.

Rolex sues online reseller melrose.com

Rolex has online watch seller melrose.com, alleging it used counterfeit parts in older, pre-owned watches.

Melrose told the Los Angeles Times it has the right to sell used watches.

There are millions of authentic Rolexes out there, and at least millions of fakes. Know who you are dealing with if you are buying or selling.

What’s Olympic gold worth in pawn?

An Olympic gold medal is only plate, not solid gold.

It’s really silver-gilt: thin, nearly pure gold over sterling silver.

At current prices of around $!,600 an ounce for gold and $28 an ounce for silver, the metal content of an Olympic medal is around $788.

Add in the sweat equity, though, and it’s priceless.

The nationalism of sport

The host Britons are doing exceptionally well at the XXX Olympiad (despite Mitt Romney’s doubts), leading to claims by NBC reporters that this is the greatest, most uplifting sporting success in English history.

This is typical of TV, which knows nothing of history. The greatest sports event in English history was its wholly unexpected victory in the 1966 Football Association World Cup, which came at a time when memories of the losses of World War II were still fresh (and you could see bomb craters in London) and the country was in the midst of a distressing economic slump.

As any Englishman will tell you, the ’66 cup changed the public outlook. The well-known writer David Lodge even wrote a novel about it.

Are stocks a Ponzi scheme? How about bonds?

Idly, I wondered about the “Dow 30,000” book I recalled seeing (but never reading) on a day when the Dow struggled, again, to get to 13,000 and when Bill Gross, the , declared that securities are a “Ponzi scheme” and we will never again see the returns of the past century.

I had forgotten that there were also “Dow 36,000” and “Dow 40,000” books, and learned — what I had not known before — that James Glassman, author of the “Dow 36,000” book, was a financial adviser to John McCain’s presidential campaign and is today founding of the George W, Bush Institute at Southern Methodist U.

That explains a lot.

What does this have to do with pawnshops? Nothing directly, but if you have assets, Kamaaina Loan can turn them into cash. Whatever number the Dow index is at

To mall or not to mall

Some background on the controversy about the Kihei megamall:

Less than 30 years ago, the sum total of national retailers on Maui was Sears, National Dollar and Woolworth, among general retailers. No Kmart, no Wal-mart.

Today, no Woolworth and no National Dollar.

There weren’t a lot of specialized national retailers here 30 years ago, either: no Pier One, no Sports Authority (which didn’t yet exist).

Today we have outlets from Tiffany to Home Depot and it night seen that rural Maui has caught up with national urban retailing trends. Far from it,

Around 1990, a speaker brought in by the Main Street Association asserted that there were 140 national chains that were NOT on Maui.

I haven’t seen any more recent estimate, but although we have added many, many national chains since 1990, my guess is that the number today would be even higher than 140.

There are a lot more national (and even international) retailers like Ikea than there used to be.

If you think about just fast food chains, Maui lacks dozens. Chick-Fil-A is in the news, but on Maui you cannot either support or protest its position about marriage, because it isn’t here.

Neither is Sonic, Long John Silver’s, Popeye’s, Boston Market, Friendly’s and many more.

Among non-food retailers that are still absent are Target (probably on its way soon), Kohl’s, Bed Bath & Beyond, Pottery Barn and on and on.

This helps to explain the desire of developers to build more malls on Maui. Maui may or may not be a top tier location — it wasn’t for J.C. Penney — but national chains have to expand to satisfy Wall Street.

Tales from a Pawn Shop: The teacher who liked rings

Every day, a pawn shop is the scene of stories that are uplifting, tragic, funny or a combination of all three, Here, heard at the National Pawnbrokers Association convention, is one that is tragic and inspiring:

THE TEACHER WHO LIKED RINGS

In a southern pawn shop, there was a customer, a schoolteacher, who liked rings. She bought rings, sold rings, occasionally pawned rings.

Sometimes, when she found one she liked, she put it on layaway. Once she retired, and was living on a small pension, she sometimes had difficulty keeping up with her layaway payments.

Often, she failed to pay off within the store’s usual time limit of six months, but the pawnbroker treated her leniently because she was a good customer.

One rather expensive ring had been on layaway for more than two years when the woman died.

The pawnbroker called the woman’s daughter and told her that her mother had had a ring on layaway, still only half paid for, that the daughter could claim if she wanted to.

The daughter came to the store and told the owner that when her mother’s house burned (the cause of her death), everything she owned was destroyed.

“I don’t have a single thing of my mother’s,” she said.

The pawnbroker said, “This ring obviously meant a lot to your mother, since she tried so hard to pay it off. Here, you take it.”

He did not ask for the unpaid balance.

The daughter told the story to her local newspaper, which published it.