Dumbest Things People Brought To Pawn Shops Thinking They Were Gonna Strike It Rich (r/AskReddit)

pawnshop workers have read it what is the dumbest thing a customer has brought in thinking they went on a strike it rich a thief stole our heavy-duty snowblower out of the garage in early July during a heatwave and took it to local pawn shop hoping to fetch a big price for it after the police called to say they had located it the pawnshop owner said the guy just couldn't understand why there wouldn't be a hot market for an expensive snowblower year-round a kid from my school had a letter signed by Abraham Lincoln he brought it to show-and-tell one day and we were all super impressed in grade 12 he stolen it from his dad and went to pawn it he bragged about how he was going to be rich it turns out his grandfather forged the letter and gave it to his dad as a gift watching Antiques Roadshow a couple of years back a woman came in to get her old lamp appraised the show's appraiser took the lamp said something along the lines of Wow priceless Ming vars he then proceeded to remove the whole lamp section from the base threw it away and said unfortunately somebody decided to make it a lamp and drilled a hole in the bottom rendering the priceless Ming vars worthless I've never seen anybody go from okay to just hit the lottery to somebody just flushed my lottery ticket down the toilet in such a short space of time now is my time to shine I am a store manager at one of the busiest pawnshops in Northern California and because of that I have a high volume of customers that most don't so that means lots of stories one a guy brought in a stone painted green claiming it was ancient gold and that after ian's it had developed a pattern ax I tried to explain to him that all gold his ancient gold made in something as intense as dead star colliding but he insisted it was gold after about 30 minutes of discussion he forced me to test it and when I showed him it wasn't gold he told me he spent four thousand buying it off some guy - a guy brought in a bag of used syringes and wanted to trade it for a TV I did not oblige three a guy brought in a piece of safety glass from a windshield and claimed it was a diamond even when I assured him it wasn't for someone brought in a clump have bent and slightly melted forks and spoons claiming it was a meteorite fallen from the ice trash dump shot into space five some whom brought in a costume cape claiming it was the real invisibility cloak from Harry Potter with further questioning he didn't think it was a prop from the movie but the actual magical cape six as a watch guy this is my favorite someone brought in a Rolex watch claiming their father gave it to them when I showed her that it actually said Rolf Lex and skits made she claimed that those were misprints and meant it was worth more because of it after I opened the watch to show her the movement I saw that there was no movement at all but just a wait in the back seven a couple came in with an old 1990 30-inch TV claiming that it was antique and refused to leave the store until we gave them eight hundred dollars for it we showed them selling online for literally a couple of dollars but they refused and said they know what they had eight not in line with crazy item but a good story a couple used to come in once a week and porn staff well apparently one day the wife decided she was done with him as a husband snuck up behind him in the store sprayed him in the face with pepper spray stole his car keys and his wallet ran out of the store and stole his car nine someone came in with an obviously recently used dialysis machine still had blood sprayed on it like they ripped it away while it was in use I don't know and tried to sell it for thousands of dollars we passed if you guys would like I can do an AMA if I get enough people interested I would love to share more stories had a guy try get 100 dollars for two wheat pennies and two buffalo nickels for legs about five years ago I had a guy call a store and asked if we took gps's I told him we did then he asked the address to the store I told him then he asked me how to get there one time this guy brought in a chair he said Lincoln sat in I called my Lincoln chair guy and he said it was fake there was a buy and sell by my house that would give you five dollars for any game and sell every game for ten I used to go in and check prices on all games and if I would make more than ten from Gamestop I would buy the game go to Game Stop and sell it and then buy all the crappy games Game Stop had that were less than five dollars and take it back to the buy and sell to make more money I was a heroin addict at the time so that was my job when I wasn't working at the restaurant comic book shop employee every single seller has a totally mint collection and a first appearance of Superman or Batman there have been literally hundreds of Batman Superman number ones printed over the years every time they reboot a series it starts at issue number one the people who were polite about it I didn't mind the people who thought we were trying to rip them off in that their books were priceless just at my head in I didn't work at a pawn shop but a second-hand movie music video game comic toy store and Casey called vintage stock games everyone knows this one people would buy a game at gamestop and come in a couple of weeks later and expect us to give them $40 cash or 55 in trade-in for a $60 that tanked or people would try and sell us a five-year-old madden game and be insulted at the 25 cent trade-in we offered for a game we knew was going to sit on our shelves my favorite was the woman who bought 10 copies of ff7 Greatest Hits and thought we would pay 100 bucks for each one sure if you brought in sukham to Aluna we might offer you a nice chunk of change but if it got a Greatest Hits release not so much comics and toys every father regretted not keeping his Action Comics 1 and every mother lamented not having the original Barbie but in the late 80s and 90s they started mass-producing that [ __ ] 15 year-old comics and toys have almost no value death of Superman and your 100 beanie babies are not worth our time sports paraphernalia unless you can prove Joe Montana signed that football or George Brett signed that card we can't take it at least for what you are asking the Brett Favre a rookie card is neat but why did you use it as a coaster for your coffee mug a signed hockey stick get the duck out this is Kansas City we don't know what a hockey stick looks like movies and music in the early to mid zeroes when Netflix mailed you movers and steam didn't exist all media was physical or downloaded off Qasr that didn't mean we will give you $5 for every DVD and $3 for every CD nobody wants to buy Yanni's greatest hits and we already have 16 copies of spider-man 2 garage sale moms will come in with trash bags full of random crap and expect to make a living off of it we would sort through so much crap over the summer because of bored stay-at-home mom thought giving the grammar down the block a check for 20 bucks for every DVD at her sale would net her hundreds of dollars the big secret that shouldn't be a secret is that second-hand stores are still in it to make a profit if the Beckett guide says your card is worth 30 bucks we are not going to give you 30 bucks if we can sell your shitty scratched corn CD for $5 we are going to give you one point five dollar cash and three dollar trade-in if we are feeling very very generous that Star Wars figure might be worth 500 bucks and you only want $300 but if it's going to sit in the display case for a decade we won't buy it we want to make money and if there is no demand we will lowball you enough that hopefully you leave since I left I heard they went to a standard buy slash trade value but when I worked there it was up to the manager and the manager at the time kind let the people who knew about the product determined the price yes I massively undercut the obvious meth-head woman who somehow found a copy of risk for the ps1 yes I would buy a bulk bag of magic cards because I knew that if we started to price them they would discover the few ones that are actually worth something but 95% of the time people that bitched about what we were offering sold us crap that still sitting in a clearance bin works at a traditional game store had plenty of sketchy white trash people coming in with their kids old yugioh and magic cards thinking they're extremely valuable usually it was just a mismatched starter set from the early 2000s or the like I'm not sure what started the idea that old trading cards were going to be ridiculously valuable but no I won't give you meth money for your Dark Magician the level of disappointment and often times outright anger on their part was difficult to deal with I began just telling trashy looking people who weren't still regulars that weeded and purchase cards did once have a guy bring in a collection that had an ugly-looking Black Lotus gave him a good deal for it not a pawn shop worker but this is still kind of a cool story or at least I think either way both the shop owner and I were happy with the events that went down I used to frequent yard sales buy vintage items and then take them to the antiques shop and make a little money on the side one day I found this little glass figurine at a yard sale for 25 cents when I flipped the item over and saw the red Occupied Japan logo I got extremely excited and bought it on the spot I took it over the shop and sold it for $45 the shop owner wouldn't go any higher but hey I made 44 dollars and 75 cents of a quick purchase so I wasn't too worried the figure was actually worth about 125 dollars either way I made money and that figure is still sitting in his shop for sale at 125 dollars not a pawn shop but Game Stop dude rolled in with hundreds of bootleg games and a bunch of modded consoles he couldn't fathom why I wouldn't take them I'm a pawnbroker somebody brought in their dead grandmother's gold tooth plucked from her ashes with the tooth still in it we told her that the tooth had to be separated from the gold for us to weigh it they desecrated their loved ones remains for less than two dollars a guy literally brought in an RPG he was doing yard work for this old lady whose husband had passed she gave it to him for doing some yard work not realizing it was live and active the guy was career military and after the bomb squad came and disabled it they went to her house and found a trove of similarly very illegal military-grade weapons I took an old $10 bill into a dealer to see how much it was worth don't recall a year but it was old guy says $10 showed me what a bill would have to be like spent 30 minutes in his store with him looking at rare money a good friend of mine owns a pawn shop in Florida he once bought a collectible book of state quarters for less than face value of the coins the customer wasn't bright enough to pop the quarters out of the book and spend them my buddy's ability to keep a straight face in those situations and make the customer feel like he's getting a deal provides me endless entertainment a friends uncle allowed us to shadow him for a day at his pawn shop a guy walked in with a metal lockbox and said he had something worth billions he opened the lockbox and there were wood chips in it and the smell of spray paint he claimed they were leftovers of the Cross Jesus was crucified on he is descended from an ancient and noble line of knights who took oaths to protect the cross he wanted $2,000 for the lockbox and wood chips I don't work in a pawn shop but I bought my first guitar in one the big defense contractor in my town late of over 10,000 people overnight and the contagion spread I was looking for my first guitar and I'm cheap after checking the music stores I hit up the pawn shops near work while I'm looking this clean-cut guy in his early 30s comes in trying to pawn his guitar hard case and effects since the shop had a bunch they offered him crap evidently and he left he was almost crying saying he got laid off and had to pay some bills I followed him out and asked him what he wanted for it he said 100 dollars and I took it I also gave him my phone number and said he could buy it back when he got back on his feet I never heard from him I'm looking at it now and played for months I hope everything worked out for him I worked in a jewelry store during the peak of the everybody buys gold and diamonds phase a group of kids comes in withering they found in the parking lot it's an obvious Caesar which I tell the ringleader as soon as he hands it to me one of the others demands a touch annoyed how do you know in one of those excellent to rare moments of perfect reaction I asked why do you bring it to me because you're a jeweler Oh as a worker in the ghetto I get grilles and gold teeth almost daily straight from the mouth and then they get mad when I can't accept it and throw a fit every employee wears panic buttons to call the cops immediately if something happens as well I may be late to this but I worked at a pawn shop for about six years I once had a customer walk up to the counter and sleight a gold coin to me and say I think this is gold man this particular customer wreaked of violent looked like he was high on everything possible I looked at the coin and slid it back to him and replied I think it's a chuck-e-cheese token I can tell by the mouse on it he just said oh and walked away that was when I noticed he had shed his pants to the point it was almost all the way down his pant leg I worked in a pawn shop for around seven years or so we had people trying to pawn fake jewelry all the time the best part was when they didn't know it was fake so many women left yelling about that cheap son of a I can't even remember half the stupid should we turned away there was one thing that we didn't turn away and we should have though and I love this story one of the other employees took in what he described as a 24k gold baby bracelet it was a [ __ ] ring a golden [ __ ] ring this employee was a bit of a know-it-all and he liked to rub other people's mistakes in their faces he eventually went on to become manager and then district manager and you can bet your ass I made sure that every employee under him knew about the baby bracelet he never lived that down had a guy try selling me a gun before I could even know him out of their shop is a New Jersey we do not buy guns he began to point the gun around with people all over the store pulling the trigger that guy that guy was a special kind of guy fortunately the gun wasn't loaded but still I don't work at the pawn shop but my friend does people bring in dumb [ __ ] all the time to get a few dollars for dope it starts from a candies box stolen from a shop next to the pawn shop two plungers rubber ducks electronics real and fake jewelery they thought it was real and ending on cars I just have to say I've only tried to sell something to a pawn shop once some kind of CB radio set up and related components and they offered me $20 when I told them that wasn't enough they laughed at me and said I wouldn't get a better offer anywhere else I ended up selling it on Craigslist for $300

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Keywords: r/ask reddit, r/ askreddit, best posts and comments, askreddit top posts, reddit top posts

Id: U6rLXkKQ788

Length: 16min 36sec (996 seconds)

Published: Tue Feb 18 2020