Last year, we visited eight Detroit pawn shops with a violin, an iPad, a gold ring, and a diamond ring. How much would you expect their bids to differ as you walked from one shop to the next, item in hand?įar more than you’d think. Suppose you gathered every pawn shop in your city and set them next to one another. Our first question: how does a pawn shop decide what to offer for an item? But for such a big industry – nearly $15B in revenue per year – there’s very little transparency in how pawn shops work. For them, selling or pawning their possessions is the difference between keeping the lights on and living in the dark.
More than 30 million Americans routinely rely on pawn shops.
