E Z Pawn Corp. Media

A typical day at a pawn shop as reported by a famous local news paper:


The 14kt gold hoop earrings were $250, more than a third of Michelle May’s rent. She bought them anyway, and treasured them, but wore them for only two months.
 
One rainy afternoon in May, she decided to pledge the earrings to get something back, and took them to a local pawn shop. The pawn broker examined them for a moment, then set them on a scale. Minutes later, Ms. May was handed $80 and a contract.

Ms. May, 48, used the $80 to buy groceries, a MetroCard to get to and from work on the subway, and a dinner of pizza for her three sons. She needed the money because she had given her father all she had — she makes $19 an hour as a social worker — to let him take the boys to Walt Disney World. She covered some of the expenses; her father paid the rest.

The boys — 14, 10 and 8 — had no idea that they would soon be headed to Disney World. They also had no idea that their mother had pawned some of her favorite jewelry to enable them to go.

The shelves and safes at the pawn shop are stocked with such secrets: Ms. May’s hoop earrings, the diamond-studded watch that Danny B, 34, used as collateral to pay parking tickets on his truck, the two gold bracelets Marty S, 23,  temporarily pawned to pay his electric bill.

“Most of the people that come in here live paycheck to paycheck,” says the pawn shop clerk. “They’re all working-class people,” he said "Good hard working people. Maybe they can’t manage their money properly, or because of the economy the way it is, or they can’t seem to catch a break. Pampers, light bills, the rent is due, car payment, oil bill. It’s for a mountain of things.”

Joe gracefully walks up to the counter and puts his gold bracelet through the window.  He's a regular states the pawn broker. "How much do you need to day joe?" asks the clerk confidently.  "I just need to pay my cable bill" he explains "give me a hundred".  Three minutes later Joe is out the door with the cash and his contract.  The clerk turns to me and says "He'll be back next week and it will cost him 112.00 dollars, one hundred that's what he borrowed and twelve that's for the shop, if the cable company turns off his service they'll charge a lot more to reconnect it."

Its the same story all over, bounce check fees, cash advances on credit cards, late fees etc etc when you compare the costs Pawn shops are much more economical.

To spend time behind the counter of a Pawnbroker is to glimpse the commerce of the city at its most primitive and basic need. For a place filled with small, precious things, the pawnshop and its customers carry heavy burdens. The story of Ms. May’s earrings and their eventual fate — like the hundreds of thousands of other items that pass in and out of the city’s pawn shops each year — illustrates the murky ground between financial help and sentimental regret, between luxury and necessity, that the stores occupy.

The pawn shop is nothing like the seedy stereotype of a pawn shop seen on TV or in the movies. It is a brightly lighted storefront in NYC, near the hum of a busy metropolis.

Ms. May comes back three weeks later and together with her contract and ninety one dollars and forty cents redeems her precious earrings and places them back into her ears where they belong.