Rick has taken quite a lot of old stuff to another guy named Rick, Rick Dale, who runs a Las Vegas antique restoration company in order to have it fixed up. The fourth main character is Austin "Chumlee" Russell, a longtime friend of Corey and the shop Butt-Monkey, who is hinted to be smarter than he looks. Rick's son Corey, known as Big Hoss, also works at the store and is learning the business in order to someday inherit the store (as of season 6 he's given a 5% partnership) - which leads to some father/son conflict. His purpose is to reprimand workers for being lazy, be the butt of old jokes, and tell When I Was Your Age. And not all items are brought into the store itself, as they are often asked to look over exceptionally large items or collections.Īlso on the show is Rick's father and co-owner Richard, known as "The Old Man". He's been in the business for 15 years.A big part of the show, which anyone familiar with basic business sense would know about, is that Rick is generally not willing to purchase an item unless he can get it for about 60% of its market value, and that's not considering any additional costs such as restoration or cataloging, because otherwise he won't make a profit for himself. The real experience comes from buying and selling things every day. As an experienced pawnbroker, Ausley gets most of his information about prices by walking around stores and looking at catalogs, and also by talking with other pawnbrokers. "When you are starting out, there are books you can use, but those books are no good," says Ausley. Part of the art of being a pawnbroker is having a sixth sense about how much things are worth both new and used.
The pawn ticket for this item would ask for $24.40 (2 percent interest plus 20 percent in other fees) in 30 days. According to Ausley, the idea is to "loan out about one-third of what I think I can get for the item when I sell it." If an item is priced at $100 new, and the pawnbroker thinks it will sell for $60 used, then the loan amount would be $20. From the pawnbroker's standpoint, a pawnshop is simply a business. Today, you can buy a used one for less than $40! When they first came out in the mid 1980s, VCRs were pretty expensive. That's 264 percent per year! Let's take a look at how a business can legally charge that type of interest. Of course, $2.20 fees due in 30 days for a $10 loan is a pretty steep rate. A pawnshop is a quick, easy way to get a loan. If you need $100 to make it through the week to your next paycheck, where are you going to get the money? A bank is not going to touch a small loan like that, and even if it did it would take a week or two to process the application. In many communities, the pawnshop is pretty much the only easy way to borrow small amounts of money. In a busy pawnshop, that sort of transaction happens hundreds of times every day.
That, in a nutshell, is the basic pawnshop transaction. I can do nothing, in which case the pawnshop keeps my ring and sells it.Here's where some pawnshops differ on the second-month contract: Some would make you pay 22 percent on the new principal, $12.20, (for a total of $14.88), while other pawnshops will allow you to continue paying 22 percent on the original principal. At this point, I'd have to enter into a new contract for the next 30 days. I can return to the pawn shop and pay the monthly fee ($2.20 in this case) to extend my loan for another 30 days.