PRINTSecond(hand) life
Get gold, guitars and guns down at the pawn shop
Photo: Christine Martinez
Pawnbroker Adam McCollum takes a call at Family Pawn. He knows the value of many items by heart; if he’s unsure, he checks the going price on eBay.
June 24, 2009 | 12:00 a.m. CST
A line of 27-inch televisions — the old-school kind with convex screens and massive backsides — are set to ESPN. On the screens, basketball players silently pass and jump. In the room, piped-in ’70s classic rock favorites replace their shouts and thuds until a man with a chainsaw enters. The loud, dull buzzing of the saw momentarily drowns out a guitar solo.
“We do a lot of different transactions,” says Pat McCollum, manager of Family Pawn. “Buying gold, writing loans, people need money for their electric bill. We have a lot of regular customers that come in and shop.”
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These customers run the gamut from scruffy musicians in search of a bargain drum set to shopping families, their children playing underfoot.
Like customers, the merchandise also varies. At one end of the store grow lights can be found; at the other, a collection of snow globes. Each item has its own untold story. The jewelry counter, with its rows upon rows of sparkly wedding bands, is particularly intriguing.
“A lot of times it never made it to the altar,” sales associate Linda Little Eagle says. Divorce and desires to upsize an existing ring are other common tales, she says.
Little Eagle says that traffic in both buying and selling has increased during the economic downturn. “People are eliminating their necessities,” she says.
In addition to cutting costs, customers are also finding cheaper-than-new items. The television that Dedra Milholland, 50, recently bought was $200 less at Family Pawn than it was at Wal-Mart, she says.
Speaking of electronics, Family Pawn’s selection could be a miniature museum of technology. Next to the new-fangled DVDs are the VHS tapes, stored in a special carousel exclusively engineered to hold VHS-shaped objects. Among run-of-the-mill audio equipment lies a stereo with a 200-CD holder, one of those fleeting innovations concurrently ahead and behind its time.
Dental gold is the strangest item Adam McCollum, sales associate, has run across. “Sometimes the tooth is still on it,” he says. “You have to hit it with a hammer.” People that sell dental gold often do so because they’ve had their fillings redone or their teeth replaced, Pat McCollum says.
“We’re probably one of the largest buyers of scrap gold in this area,” he continues. Once enough dental gold and other scrap gold are collected, McCollum says Family Pawn usually ships it to a gold refinery in Columbia, where it is melted down, and the refinery pays the store the current going rate for gold.
Across the store, Robert Dowdy, 37, peruses the DVDs. He says he also buys guns from pawnshops but has never sold anything to one. “I don’t use it for financial supplementation or whatever you might call it,” he says. “Unfortunately, pawnshops are designed around people with low incomes.” Dowdy, a social work master’s student at MU, says he works with people with low incomes and analyzes payday lenders for his job.
But Little Eagle says Family Pawn provides valuable services that assist customers in need. “You get people in that just need a little help and you try to do what you can to help them … we play a big role in our community.”
“Stimulating the economy,” Pat McCollum chimes in.
“Think of how many people wouldn’t have electricity …” Little Eagle says.
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