Crime. Dirt. Suspicious characters. Pawn shops are typically relegated to a seedy backwater of the American consciousness.
Northwestern student D.J. Haun, who has never visited a pawn shop, said he feels negatively about the business nonetheless.
“Based on what I’ve seen on the TV and in movies, (pawn shops consist of) mainly stolen goods and shady enterprises,” the Communication senior said.
Evanston’s Windy City Jewelry & Loan Ltd. is tired of the stereotypes and is working its hardest to defy them, said store manager Bruno Wilson. The shop is clean and neat, and no one can enter without first being buzzed in by an attendant.
Wilson, who has been in the pawning business for 22 years, is sure that his business, located at 959 Howard St., has a place in Evanston. He said this even in light of U.S. Senate Bill 500, a bill proposed early this month to extend regulation on pawn shops. The measure is supposed to reign in interest rates shops can charge on pawned goods, rates that can reach as high as several hundred percent annually. But shop owners say few people ever pawn their belongs for that much time, and if passed, the new legislation may force their shops to close down, eliminating a needed source of short-term cash.
“I feel we serve a real big niche in the community,” Wilson said. “We provide non-recourse collateral loans to people throughout the community because they’re not making enough to keep up.”
The most important part of the service, Wilson said, was that the loans were in fact “non-recourse collateral,” which is based on property rather than credit.
At a pawn shop, a person comes in with a piece of property, generally jewelry or electronics. The pawn shop will assign a value to it and loan that money to the customer. The customer then has a month to repay the loan, at which time the item will be returned to them. If a customer chooses not to pick up an item, the person is not penalized and his or her credit is not harmed; the items are simply put up for sale in the shop’s front room. This lack of credit penalty, Wilson said, is appealing to community residents, particularly in this economy.
“People’s credit has been ruined by payday loans and title loans,” he said. “Because of our stereotype, people come to us last but wish they had come to us first.”
Wilson also said the stereotypes of the pawn industry are largely perpetuated by Hollywood and the news media, stereotypes that aren’t always fair. Pawn shops are often confused with buy-and-resell shops, which aren’t regulated and can often serve as a way for criminals to get fast cash for stolen goods, Wilson said.
One recent example occurred in Evanston when the Cook County Sheriff’s Office set up a fake buy and resell shop, recovering more than 100 stolen goods. Though no pawn transactions occurred, this was not the way the story often appeared.
“The name of the (fake) store was Leo’s Resale Shop, not Leo’s Pawn Shop,” Wilson said, arguing the two are completely different things. “All of a sudden a buy-and-sell shop becomes a pawn shop because the word ‘pawn’ gets everybody’s attention.”
One area of pride for Wilson and his business is that they, like all pawn shops, are required to cooperate with police. Every item brought into a pawn shop has its name, description and serial number entered into a service called LeadsOnline, a national database accessible to police departments. This results in very few stolen goods brought into pawn shops – less than one-tenth of a percent.
Evanston Police Department Cmdr. Tom Guenther said there is a healthy partnership between the department and Windy City.
“I’ve had a good working relationship with them,” he said. “They’re a legitimate business; we don’t have any problems with them.”
Despite recent legislation attempting to further regulate the pawn industry, Wilson is not fazed. He said there have always been attempts at more regulation of pawn shops, while nothing is being done regarding the buy-and-sell shops he said can be conducive to criminal activity. This is unfortunate, he said.
“Instead of more regulation for our industry,” Wilson said, “we would like to see all other industries that are buying and reselling precious metals and jewelry and electronics to be held to the same standard that we are.”
