pawn shops (sotd)

i always feel bad about going to pawn shops. traditionally, the economic function of middleman has been misunderstood and undervalued, and middlemen have been shamed or despised as a result. but pawn shops aren't merely retailers - to a significant extent they are exploiting people who are going through hard economic times.

these days, though, like many other services, pawnbrokers are being rendered irrelevant by the internet. between ebay and craigslist, individuals are able, through aucitoning or direct negotiation, to find suitable prices that leave them both better off.

for example, if i sell some dvds to a pawnbroker he might give me like $2 a pop for them. then he'll offload them for like $10-15 a pop. which is fine - he has to pay rent and utilities on his location, plus other business costs, plus some profit so he can buy things like food and clothing and a place to live. but if i use craigslist i might be able to sell them for like $6-7 a pop to someone directly, and both of us win: i get more for selling them, and the buyer pays less for the same product. the only loser is the now-unnecessary pawnbroker.

the big problem with this is not that it will put pawnbrokers out of business - if that happened they can find other jobs and those shops will become something economically more useful. the problem is that they won't, because internet usage hasn't fully penetrated the population. so the people left using pawnshops are overwhelmingly either people who are too poor to use the internet, and therefore in desperate straits and easy to exploit, or people trying to offload stolen goods. thus, even though one does nothing directly ethically wrong by buying from a pawnshop, one is buying into a system that really is exploitative and possibility criminal.

all i needed was an alarm clock, which is something that is frankly one of the harder things to get on ebay or craigslist - it's not unique, like a specific dvd, or expensive like a video-game console or other electronic equipment, or rare like memorabilia. it's just a cheap radio alarm clock. but assuming it wasn't stolen, that used to be someone else's alarm clock. and maybe they pawned it because they simply didn't need or want it. but maybe they pawned it because they felt they had no choice. and it although it was the best way for me to get an alarm clock, in terms of product quality relative to price, i still feel a little icky about it.

man this subject depresses me, perhaps irrationally, but nevertheless. great time to bring back the sotd. and what better: