Many Pawn Brokers are branching out and taking gold. Are they being overrun by PayDay Loan storefronts.
These businesses have a simple model: Send us your unused Gold, Platinum and jewelry by mail and we’ll send you what we think is a fair price for it.
Just reading that line suggests something is not right in this model. At least with a Pawnbroker I can go in and find out (to quote Bo Diddley from Trading Places), “… in Philadelphia it’s worth fifty bucks…”, and I can walk out. Yes, these businesses offer a return policy within a set time, but it just screams Financial Pornography!
This is a business for whoever is running it. They aim to pay you as little as they can without you saying, “Hey, that’s a rip off”. Folks who send in their gold via the mail to get money, don’t know how much gold is in their jewelry. They also don’t know what the approximate value of it might be. Thus they have no basis to figure out whether this is a ripoff, or a fair exchange.
Given the advertising for the various services, I guess this is a growing business. I am sure the money must be good. How does the receiving industry know if the person sending this jewelry owns it? There must be a form that the sender must sign, saying this is their property lawyers. What is stopping thieves from using this service? Are various legal services working with these companies to make sure stolen jewelry doesn’t get turned into cash easily? I don’t know.
If anyone has any stories about dealing with this type of service or similar ones, I’d be curious to hear them in the comments section of this post.
