Why do we say ‘gold sucks’?

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You may have seen our ads that say “Gold sucks.” Why would we say that? Aren’t we “cash for gold”? We are. And when we say “gold sucks,” that doesn’t mean we don’t like gold.

We love gold. We buy it. We sell it. We will lend you cash on the value of your gold.

What we don’t do is predict where the price will go next. If you bought gold a year ago, you should be feeling pretty good. The price is way up.

But if you bought a couple of months ago, maybe you feel like you made a mistake. The price is down a couple hundred dollars an ounce.

Gold sells at a world price. We use the New York spot price, which is set by factors far beyond Maui.

Let’s say you are one of those people who bought gold when the price was close to $1,800 an ounce. And you need some cash today. You wouldn’t want to sell and lose $200 an ounce (based on the NY price as this is typed).

But you can bring your gold in and get a loan. We will give you the most we can based on today’s price.

Pay us back in 30 or 60 days and keep your gold. In case it goes back up past $1,800 or whatever price you paid.

So, in our view, gold only sucks if you are forced to sell. And at Kamaaina Loan Cash for Gold, we offer you another choice.

Statue of Murashige Araki

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Today we feature a particularly fine replica of a well-known equestrian statue of the famous 16th-century samurai Murashige Araki.

Find it in our jewelry and collectibles store at 42 North Market Street.

Check your mantel for termites before buying this bronze piece: It’s HEAVY!

Don’t be late–70% off!

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The Maui Sunday Store is liquidating it’s entire inventory. Everything is 70% off (except DVDs).

“Everything” includes tools, electronics, collectibles, skateboards and this’n that.

As of today, there’s still quite a bit of this ‘n that on hand, but at these prices, it will be less and less every day.

Special longer hours until everything is gone from 12 North Market Street — 10-5 weekdays, 10-4 weekends.

This is a clearance sale. Once it’s gone, it’s gone for good.

Playing in the mud

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Who remembers when the Maalaea mudflats were going to be Maui’s second harbor?
A week or so ago, the DLNR and the Corps of Engineers announced they had abandoned plans to expand Maalaea Small Boat Harbor. Their statement said the proposal went back as far as 1968.
But even earlier than that, A&B once proposed to dredge out the mudflat area for a deepwater harbor. Maui is the only one of the four major islands without two harbors.
For a multitude of reasons, it never happened, and Maui still has only one commercial harbor.
Up until the early ’90s, Maui people used to drive onto the mudflats to change the oil in their trucks, draining the used oil into – well, into what we now recognize as valuable wetlands.
Perceptions change, don’t they?
Now the Kealia Pond National Wildlife Refuge is a national treasure, a place where birders come to see Hawaiian coots (regular old coots can be seen ogling the girls at Dig Me Beach) and Hawaiian stilts.

Pawn 101: Buying fake gold

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We try not to do that.
The other day, a customer we have known for a while brought in some Credit Suisse bars to sell.
Credit Suisse 1-ounce bars are, well, they’re the gold standard of gold. And at the New York price that day, they were worth about $1,600 a piece. But, as your mother told you, trust but verify.
We knew the seller, and the bars were sealed in CS packaging, they looked right.
But, for the same reason the liquor store cards graybeards, we checked.
The first bar passed the Fisch machine, but Fisch can be fooled by gold plate.
Then it passed the weight test. A 1-ounce bar should weigh 31.1 grams. It did.
Then came the acid test. Literally.
Gold is the only metal that stands up to concentrated nitric acid. This test requires scarring the bar, so first we got permission from the owner.
The first acid test indicated 22 karats. Uh, oh. A CS bar is .999 fine, so it should be 24k.
The last test required filing deep into the bar, past the gold plate, if that’s all it was. A drop of nitric acid in the cut started frothing, a bad sign. The metal inside was reacting.
Turning the cut onto a paper towel showed a green stain. No doubt about it. It was a fake.
We didn’t suspect the customer. He was probably a victim already of some unscrupulous con artist. (It would be unusual for the originator of a fake bar to come to us directly; especially if it is a very good fake, as this one was. It takes real skill to get the weight right, but gold-plated titanium can do even that.)

So little did we doubt him that we bought two other Swiss bars, called PARA Suisse, that did test OK, from him.

The lesson here: Don’t buy gold from people you trust. Buy from people you have a reason to trust.

Same with selling. Don’t just trust the person you sell it to. Have a reason to trust him.

Sleepy time gal

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Kamaaina Loan’s live “sleeping beauty” was the hit of Wailuku First Friday. We weren’t sure exactly how the crowd would react, but the living window display had something for everybody.

Parents brought their keiki to see the sleeping girl, and young adults sought out our staff to ask: “Is she real?”

Indeed, she is. And “sleeping beauty” will be back in the sack from 11 a.m. to 1 p.m. for the next several weeks, if you would like to drop by.

(There is a stable of sleeping beauties, not all of them beautiful girls. Some will be beautiful guys.)

There’s something compelling, apparently, about watching somebody else sleep in public.

The sleeping beauty is making a point: She sleeps contentedly because she knows that the valuables she left with Kamaaina Loan are safe in a bonded, insured warehouse. When she awakes and comes in to reclaim them, they will be there.

Not every pawn shop on Maui can say as much.

Pawn 101: Domestic science in the pawnshop

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Pawnbroking, by definition, involves used stuff, which means dealing with wear and tear and dirt. We clean jewelry and steam diamonds, for example.

Here’s a simple way to deal with dents in your sterling silver hollowware (or gold hollowware, in the rare event you have any of that):

Recently we bought a Tiffany sterling water pitcher with a thumb-size dent in the body, probably from dropping on the floor. Pushing the dent out was easy — just roll a hard sphere back and forth from the inside.

We used a billiard ball.

Yikes! The taxman cometh

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This is the time of year when unexpectedly high tax calculations send people digging in the back of the closet for something they can pawn to help pay the IRS.

Customers don’t have to tell a pawnbroker why they need the money, because the collateral they offer does the talking — we’re different from banks that way — but they often do anyway.

For instance, recently a customer, who said he had to raise a couple of thousand dollars more than he had counted on to meet his tax bill, brought in a silver-gilt sugar bowl. It was dented and tarnished, but it had a history behind it.

According to him, his grandfather had fled Hitler’s armies in Lithuania in 1941 with silver, gold and amber. The sugar bowl was part of that stash that had found its way to Maui 70 years later.

Pawn 101: Jeweler markups

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The following incidents both happened Monday, but something similar occurs just about every day in the pawn shop.

A woman came in wondering if she could sell a gold chain with a small (about the size of a postage stamp) bangle covered in diamonds.

The chain was very fine and the whole item weighed around 7 grams, or about a quarter of an ounce.

It was 18-karat gold, so sure, it had value. We estimated about $150 for the gold and another $50 for the diamonds, which were miele — tiny chips.

The woman and her husband really needed cash, but she hesitated to take the offer. After several exchanges, it came out why: She had paid $2,400 for the jewelry.

That’s right. The retail jeweler had sold it at a price 12 times the value of the materials. And, to tell the truth, probably more than 12 times, because the value of gold has gone way up over the past year.

With mass-produced jewelry, which is what this was, the resale value is almost always the recycling value: the gold is melted, after the diamonds are recovered, and the miele is sold to jewelers for reuse.

$200 was a fair price — it was based on the New York spot price of gold and the world diamond market — but the woman didn’t take it. Too painful to realize the loss, probably.

Later in the afternoon, a man came in with a bracelet string of small, misshapen, grayish pearls — rather pretty but valueless.

He was hoping to get $250 for it. $100? No. $50? Sorry.

But, he said, he had paid $525 for it.

It really had almost no resale value, either as a whole piece or as individual pearls.

He was mighty disappointed and left to shop around. Late in the day, he came back. The answers he had gotten everywhere else were, manana.

Our pawnbroker offered him $10, more as an accommodation than anything else, as we really didn’t want it.

In the end, he kept his bauble.

Facelift at 50

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The Kamaaina Loan tool store at 50 North Market Street is closed today. It is being expanded and brightened and should be ready for business by Tuesday if the paint dries fast enough.

There are lots of changes going on. The Sunday Store at 12 North Market is undergoing an extensive rebuild and will reopen soon.

Not everybody realizes it, but Kamaaina Loan has outlets at 12, 42, 46, 50, 52 and 98 North Market — from one end of the block to the other. And a private parking lot for customers behind 98 (enter from Vineyard Street).