People come to my pawn shop to Unshop.
The woman comes in, looks over my tools. “I’ve got a really nice cordless drill,” she says, watching me sidelong. “DeWalt. Hardly ever used. Two batteries.” Then she looks at me hopefully.
“Wow you have some nice guitars,” a dude with a pony tail says. “I’ve got one, its an acoustic like this. Do you think you could give me, like, two hundred dollars for it? “
A woman checks out the wall over my desk, gets excited. “Oh, you take paintings?” She looks so hopeful, as if she just discovered the answer to a horrible dilemma right there on my wall.
Whatever else you can say about the American Economic Downturn you can say this: it has certainly forced many people to rethink their priorities. Here in Georgia, where work is scarce and the leading industry, at least when viewed from behind my counter, seems to be disability claims, folks are trying to turn all the crap they spent money on over the years back into money. People are hit with the hard reality that all that crap and nonsense, the material stuff they lusted after for ages is, for the most part, meaningless crap that has to go.
Of course, since everyone is trying to do this all at once nobody is getting what they want.
Least of all myself. My industry is not recession proof by any means. The housing market is in the toilet in Georgia. This means that all the construction companies are out of work. Which leads contractors to leave their tools with me. All of them, all at once it seems. And since nobody is working, nobody is buying them. Which means that over the months I had to pay less and less for tools, and now I can’t really take them at all. Which puts a huge dent in my bottom line.
Interesting that while cash is king and everyone is selling anything they have for whatever they can get, the one item that is always a rock-solid loan is the Flat Screen TV. Folks will loose everything, guns they could have hunted meat with and tools they could have made money with and heirloom gold and collectables they swore were handed down ten generations, stuff they sword they would never loose. But they come back after the 42” 1080P Plasma. I find that sad.
