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.

 

Star gazing: Rick to get hitched

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“Pawn Stars” honcho Rick Harrison is getting married to his longtime girlfriend — who he has said will never be on the show —  on July 21. This Los Angeles Times story says Chumlee will be the ringbearer.

No word on whether Elvis will officiate. It is in Vegas, after all.

 

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

 

 

 

 

 

 

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

 

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.

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

 

Stories about diamonds

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Perhaps you have seen one of Kamaaina Loan’s ads that offers

to buy diamonds, “especially wanted, 1 carat and higher.”

However, as an episode a few days ago reveals, not all big stones

are good stones.

A customer wanted a loan on a whopper of a diamond, 3 carats.

But, in the words of Jimi, the broker who examined it, the stone

was, in technical jargon, “one level above frozen spit.”

Diamonds are valued according to size, color, clarity and cut.

This particular diamond was very poor in the clarity department,

with several inclusions and flaws that cut down on its sparkle.

Its maximum loan value was only a couple hundred bucks, very

low for such a big stone.

Diamonds are examined with a 10-power loupe.

Cut also matters. The standard or round brilliant cut has been

determined both mathematically and by experience to produce

the most sparkle and glitter. But not every stone is suited to

the standard treatment.

As an example, a couple weeks ago we were shown a largish

stone with a weird cut, not quite exactly like any of the usual

categories, such as emerald, rose etc.

What would induce a cutter to choose such a method?

We couldn’t ask the cutter, but it may have been that given

 the flaws in the stone, the bizarre cut was judged the best way

to get the most fire and light out of the stone.

Kevin recalled an example some years ago (not at Kamaaina ‘

Loan), where a customer had a cracked 2-carat stone. (Yes,

diamonds, hard as they are, can crack and chip.) Another

jeweler had recommended tossing out the stone, but Kevin

suggested sending it out to be recut.

It worked. The cutter managed to rescue one and a half carats

of good stone from the wreck.

Sometimes, it seems, the true skill of a good cutter is better

displayed on a poor stone than on a good one.

In any event, with diamonds size matters but not more than ‘

color, cut or clarity.

Pawn 101: Check under the hood

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Here’s a story that every pawn shop operator can give

personal testimony about.

A man brought us a book to see what it was worth.

It was volume 2 of a 2-volume edition of one of

Charles Darwin’s books. Ordinarily, volume 2 is

worth more than volume 1, because 2’s tend to get lost

more often. In this case, however, and on Maui, the

book was virtually worthless.

That’s because a complete set, in excellent condition,

can be had on the Internet for about $50. Given

shipping costs from Maui, and considering how

unlikely it would be to find a volume 1 here; and that

it’s a heavy book, it would cost more to marry volume 2

 up with a volume 1 on the Mainland than it’s worth.

However, while the owner was talking about where he

got the book, our assistant was flipping pages. “It’s

worth at least $20,” he told the owner.

Because someone had stuck a $20 Silver Certificate

between the pages.

At last August’s pawnbrokers’ convention, a Mainland

broker told about how a good customer whose husband

had died brought him a fancy hunting knife, hoping

she could get $300 to pay bills.

“I looked under the cotton in the knife box and there

were four one-hundred dollar bills.”

 

A sordid crime

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From India, a story about pawn customers murdering a 14-year-old assistant in a pawn shop: http://timesofindia.indiatimes.com/city/chennai/2-arrested-for-murder-of-boy-in-pawn-shop/articleshow/17012776.cms

As usual, the complete records that pawn shops everywhere keep were a big help to the police in fingering the suspects. Every item in a pawn shop has a ticket that says who it came from, where he lives etc.

There are a few cultural differences between th4 pawn shop in Chennai and any American pawn shop.

For one, it would be unusual to find a young teenager left alone in a pawn shop. Here, you have to be 18 to  be a customer or to work in a pawn shop.

For another, the robbers got away with 6 pounds of gold. Few, if any, American pawn shops keep that amount of gold on hand. For  both safety and financial reasons, they ship out their gold regularly to refiners.

It doesn’t pay to keep gold lying around when you can so easily — and instantly — get a refiner to transfer cash into your account.

But India is by far the world’s biggest A shop in Chennaiimporter of gold. Indians have a strong tendency to keep their wealth in gold, rather than in a mutual fund; so Indian pawn shops probably move a lot more gold in a day than American shops do.

The word “lakh” in the story means 100,000 and is commonly used to count large numbers of rupees. So the robbers got about $1,900 worth of rupees, a tiny amount compared with the $350,000 worth of gold they carried off.

Chennai, by the way, is a huge city, with a population about equal to that of Manhattan.

 

 

We don’t take collars any more

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Pawn shops will consider a loan on anything of value (unless, as we say, it eats), but fashions have pushed some items out of our universe.

For example, in 1838 Manhattan pawnbroker was happy to make a loan on 8 collars. He lent 37 1/2 cents.

Kamaaina Loan doesn’t make loans in fractions of a cent any more, or even fractions of a dollar,  but in 1838 37 1/2 was close to a day’s pay for some laborers.

Writing in Bloomberg News, pawn historian Wendy Woloson listed the loans made on a typical day, Aug. 31, in Simpson’s shop.

The full list is available at http://www.bloomberg.com/news/2012-02-09/a-brief-history-of-the-american-pawn-shop-echoes.html

Today, we’d take the accordian, the watch (although the “silver watch with broken hands” would be a close call), the broach, the saw (usually a power saw these days), the gold watch and chain and the silver medal.

It would have to  be a special table cloth these days at get our assent.As in 1838, most pawns are for small amounts, and most pawns are for jewelry or household items. But these days household items are more like to be TVs and video games than shawls and trousers.

The goods change over the generations but the business is mostly what it was long ago. As Woloson says,

Yesterday’s music box is today’s DVD player.