/biz/ - Business & Finance

>>54535063
sounds like you were in a cruddy part of the country.

>>54535063
Sounds based honestly

>>54535085
>implying pawn shops are in good areas
Just like tattoo parlors, rim shops, and pot stores

>>54535063
>There's a fat middle age white woman who came in to pay $15 towards her layaway for a Nintendo Switch.
Now this is grim. I'm an engineer and my girlfriend is a special ed teacher and we could easily find the $500 for a switch and a few initial games.

Is affordability really this insane in the rest of the country? I'm a relatively expensive city (chicago) and even before I was in a combined-income household, I was well within my means to support a few luxuries here and there. Are people just god awful with managing their finances?

All pawn shops are trash. Avoid.

>>54535258
Yes the average person has the financial awareness of a toddler. Layaway itself is a concept that only makes sense to the financially illiterate. It's pretty much giving an interest free loan to the broker because you can't trust yourself to not spend that money yourself.

I could see maybe if it's an extremely rare item that your afraid might be sold out before you can afford it (still retarded), but this is a Nintendo Switch, they're fucking everywhere.

>>54535258
Yes dude. People will buy $50 in food with ebt at a gas station

>>54535392
>layaway
I've heard of layaway before but just assumed it's a financed purchase that's paid off over time. If I'm reading this correctly, you put down a deposit, then start paying for the item, and can't actually recieve the product until the balance is paid in full?

What the fuck? And people willingly sign contracts for this? Holy fuck. We are doomed.

>>54535438
I can actually attest to that one first hand from working at a convenience store in college. People are downright retarded when it comes to making convenience purchases.

>>54535370
Pawn shops can be great as a retro game collector. It was just a lot better 10 years ago

>>54535861
Funniest part is the 2 gas stations I worked at were a 5 minute WALK from a big chain grocery store
You'd have people paying $7 for 2 20oz goyslop sodas when they could go across the street and get the same for $3
>inb4 richfag cope

>>54536046
Yeah the sheer lack of unit economics is baffling to me. Even among relatively educated people.

I recently had to explain to my girlfriend that the refrigerated dog food she buys for her dog is much cheaper when bought in bulk it it was so god damn frustrating.
>"but the small one is cheaper!"
come on now

>>54536345
That girl does not sound like a good long term investment...

>>54537195
All women are stupid, anon. You need to select for loyalty and teach them instead of rejecting a loyal woman who's a lil dim.

>>54535258
My sister's ex husband was a bum who would get a job for two weeks and then ghost the company after the first paycheck. They always had their electronics in and out of the pawn shop in order to get bills paid, and then they'd do layaway for a few months until they'd just stop paying altogether and lose their stuff.

>>54535063
I enjoy looking through pawns shops, you can find some nice gems every now and then. I only ever saw three people sell things at my local pawn store, one was a fat mother selling her son's PS3/4 and games while the son was away to uni, one was a daughter selling her dead father's DVD collection, and a final was a supermarket employee selling the latest Switch and PS5 games just days after they came out.

>>54535063
You can replace the battery even if it's one of those annoying ultrabook batteries. I've done it before. The worst part is taking the case apart because it's easy to break plastic flanges. Refer to youtube breakdown videos.

>>54535063
Also, people that go to the pawn shop are stupid. If you want to buy something used, buy it using facebook marketplace. It's cheaper.

>>54535829
It was a very popular program in the 50s, 60s, 70s, and even into the 80s. And yes, it sounds as bad as it is. Some people have very poor money management skills and it did help those people to save for larger purchases.

>>54538378
Sometimes there's also expensive things that are one-offs and you layaway to hold them. Mostly thinking of pawn shop guns right now.

>>54538367
Dealing with the people on Facebook marketplace is just so fucking annoying, I can’t do that again.

>>54535063
Kino story, OP. I can imagine the moment.

>>54537195
Yeah >>54538162 hits the nail on the head here - she's wonderful, very much type A and extremely ambitious. I might need to work on her economic sense a bit but in all other aspects she is an excellent long-term investment.

This is telling me to lower my standards. Not falling for it.

>>54535829
Nobody tell this anon about rent-to-own.

>>54535258
It’s a mix of a few things. Yes most of us burgers have zero budgeting skills, but when you add the layer of simple shit like groceries up 33% minimum over the course of the last year with wages having not risen at all in at least 20 years, you can easily paint a picture of just how fucked things are.

>>54539972
Well aware of this. See also: home contract buying

>>54535063
It’s not poor people you naive white person. Those people are thieves selling shit to the pawn.

>>54535063
Reminds me of childhood
When mother's social social security checks from her dead baby daddy, my dad's child support, and foodstamp money dried up (the first 2 would be spent on smokes and useless shit), we could always count on the pawn shop to give us some extra cash for smokes and cereal.
Things we lost to the pawnshop:
>family flat-screen
>family ps3
>50+ skylanders figures
>my prized $500+ train set my dead uncle gave me
I remember the old bitch even asked to pawn my tablet and 3DS after she lost all our shit by not paying the pawn shop, I told her ass "hell no".

>>54541667
That’s sad. Have you made it anon

>>54541695
Compared to others, probably not yet.
But compared to her, yes.

>>54538378
A lot of the time it was used for the kids' christmas presents and that's a good thing, it means no fighting over the last cabbage patch doll on christmas eve.

Wait, you guys don't just flatout sell your shit to the pawn shop instead of paying interest for shit that you already own?

>>54535063
pawn shops create an incentive for property theft by paying out money for stolen goods without verifying ownership

they need to be banned

>>54536046
I only every fid that when I sick or smell like my own cum

>>54535063
I used to do taxes for two hood pawn shops at the shops themselves behind bullet proof glass. One time our scheduled tax return day happened to be disability check cashing day. They were lined up hootin and hollerin before the store even opened. Top kek