Story by Sydney Bouchat
Photos by Mason Trinca
In here, nothing bought is ever new. Each item comes from humble, often desperate, beginnings. Every worn out ’90s television speaker, every tarnished gold necklace, every unwound VHS originally belonged to someone else—someone who saw it, loved it, bought it, and then sacrificed it. This is a treasure trove of some stranger’s last-ditch effort to make ends meet. This is a pawn shop.
Northwest Pawn in western Eugene is home to a variety of storied objects. Troy Hatch runs the pawn shop with his wife Amanda. Five years ago the couple bought the building, which had been a buy-and-sell shop for most of its life. In January 2010, Hatch filled out a pawnbroker’s license application through the Oregon Division of Finance and Corporate Securities (DFCS), and the buy-and-sell shop turned into a pawning store.
Now, instead of buying items outright, Hatch can dispense loans from his shop based on physical collateral. The item is kept in the shop, not for sale, until the owner can come back and repay his loan and its accumulated interest. If the loanee returns, the shop makes money from the interest—a little less than 10 percent of the total loan per month. If the loanee doesn’t return within a previously agreed upon time, the shop can then sell the collateral item to make a profit, though Hatch estimates that less than 5 percent of his customers default on their loans.
“I shouldn’t say it’s profitable,” Hatch says. “I’m still working an outside job, and my wife is working an outside job. We haven’t built it up to where it will support us.”
When he isn’t running the store, Hatch works for Union Pacific Railroad. He and Amanda moved to Oregon from Arizona for work in 2006.
“I never set out to buy a pawn shop,” says Hatch, whose background is in operating heavy equipment, not shopkeeping. Hatch bought the buy-and-sell shop on Roosevelt Boulevard as a source of income. “With the numbers that [the previous owner] had on the books, we could pay our bills. It was like we were buying a job.”
Soon after his purchase, Hatch found out that the books were inaccurate; the expected profit that prompted the Hatches to purchase the shop was less than they had anticipated.
“We came to realize that whenever it’s a buy-and-sell shop, you walk in and you’re selling something, you want as much money as you can possibly get, but the next person that’s walking in to buy it, they want it as cheap as they can get it,” he says. “It makes it that much harder to try and make a profit.”
While Hatch was starting to pawn as a source of income, across town, Debbie Barkley was just finishing up her pawning career.
Barkley owns the buy-and-sell shop, Your Place, on Franklin Boulevard. Her family bought the empty building in August 1991. Your Place spent 17 years as a pawn shop, but in 2008, after the passage of stricter state regulation for pawn shops that put larger caps on the amount of interest brokers could charge on a pawned item, Barkley gave up her pawnbroker status and turned her shop into a secondhand store. Now, instead of loaning money on items, Your Place buys them outright.
“You could make a lot of money [as a pawn shop], but money isn’t everything in life,” she says of the change. “I’ve had a lot of money, and I’ve had a little bit of money, and I’d rather have a little bit. It’s a better quality of life to make what you need to make.”
While still a pawn shop, Your Place was subject to legal controversy surrounding its pawning practices and interest rates. In 2008, the Oregon Department of Consumer and Business Services issued an enforcement order to “cease and desist violating Oregon pawnbroker laws.” According to the July 28 press release, Your Place was charged with operating without a license, charging interests rates over the legal limit, and refusing law enforcement inspections. Interest rates were estimated to be 171 percent to 1,333 percent of the total loan amount per year, and pawnbrokers are required by law to allow law enforcement or government examiners to inspect their shops without a search warrant.
“The assistance of Eugene and Lane County authorities protects consumers who use pawnbroker services as well as the businesses that are licensed, inspected, or examined and that are trying to provide a needed service in the community,” said DFCS administrator David Tatman in the press release.
After the issued order, the state fined Barkley $25,000, though this amount will be suspended if Your Place keeps a clean record until 2013. Barkley was required, however, to pay over $9,000 to cover the cost of the audit on her business. After this, she changed Your Place into a secondhand store to avoid the stress of stricter regulations.
“For a long time, the state of Oregon wanted to get some new pawn laws and legislation. We were their example,” Barkley says. “We had already made a decision to get out of [the pawning] business. It’s too bad that we didn’t just do it instead of being forced to. It was just a small business against the state. You can’t win.”
She admits that, as a pawn shop, her business was more lucrative. But now, in the absence of pawn regulation, monetary loans, and the emotional drain of everyday pawning, Barkley’s store and life have become much simpler.
“It’s a lot more fun because I see a whole different group of people,” Barkley says. “We get people coming in that have money to buy things rather than people that come in because they need money to buy milk or gas because they need to go to work.”
People without bank accounts—an estimated 17 million Americans—can use pawn shops as a means for short-term, credit-independent loans. “It’s because of the economic situation,” Barkley says. “The people are just living on the edge; that’s the type of people who would come in. You’re always seeing people who are distressed.”
At Northwest Pawn, Hatch says he’s seen his fair share of distressed customers.
“It’s not like what you see on TV with Hardcore Pawn or Pawn Stars. It’s the run of the mill: electronics, TVs, rings, things like that,” he says. He adds that such shows might feature more interesting items simply because the stores are located in the large cities of Detroit and Las Vegas, respectively.
Here in the smaller community of Eugene, Hatch and Barkley are used to a more desperate crowd.
“We had a gentleman come in who needed help buying high blood pressure medicine,” Hatch recalls. “We’re doing loans for people that we shouldn’t; it’s because they need it. We’ve loaned money to people who didn’t have anywhere else to turn. We feel for them. I don’t know if that will come back around to help us in the long run or if it’s going to sink us, but it’s the type of people we are here. We try to help.”
Despite his attempts to help every new customer who enters his shop, Hatch believes pawn shops like his have gained an unfair label, especially by those who do not understand the business.
“[Pawn shops are] looked at like a bar or a strip joint in the neighborhood,” he says. “Suddenly, the pawn shop is the bad guy. People say, ‘Well, you guys are supporting the thieves out there.’ But there’s a real need for us.”
Hatch thinks this negative stereotype came from pawn shops unknowingly purchasing stolen merchandise. Pawnbrokers are required by Oregon law to maintain accurate reports of all of the transactions they make, and this information must be presented to the authorities within three days of every transaction. Authorities keep an eye out for goods that have been reported stolen, individuals pawning many items within a short period of time (an indicator of burglary), and individuals pawning who have a criminal record. However, it remains difficult to pinpoint actual stolen goods if specific characteristics, such as a serial number, cannot be identified.
If an item is identified as stolen, the police can seize it from the pawn shop, and whatever loan money was put out on the item may not be returned to the shop.
According to the 2010 DFCS annual report, police picked up 570 stolen items from Oregon pawn shops, but this only accounted for 0.104 percent of total pawning loans made.
Additionally, the History Channel, which airs the popular show Pawn Stars, mentions in an online article that “the pawn shop industry has been criticized at times for preying upon the poor with inflated interest rates and low-balling the value of goods in order to turn a profit.”
Hatch, however, has a different opinion about such claims. “When it gets right down to it, the pawn shop is the one at risk. There’s really not enough money to be made in the business to take all the risk that we do,” he says.
The pawning of firearms also encourages a negative reputation. Northwest Pawn has a firearms section, as did Your Place before it was transformed into a secondhand store.
Due to her financial situation, Barkley cannot hire employees to help man the shop, noting that “with only one person working, it’s not safe to have guns.”
For Barkley, less income is a small price to pay for more peace of mind.
“It’s more fun,” she says of the secondhand store. “I feel like I’m playing all day. We’re really happy that we chose to do a secondhand store. The stress is gone.”
Indeed, the atmosphere in Your Place is cheery, matching the several giant smiley faces on the front of the building and the sign. The maze-like store is packed to the brim with hundreds of DVDs, farm tools, dozens of guitars, and other random knickknacks.
Barkley’s family also owns a flea market out back and an antique store to the west of Your Place. Behind the store is a warehouse with more merchandise for sale.
“This is a cool business,” she says. “When it’s quiet, I can do the bookkeeping. When it’s noisy, I can stay out here and talk to people. I’m a little bit of a blabbermouth, but that’s what makes it neat.”
But the resale lifestyle isn’t for everyone. According to the DFCS, 72 pawn licenses were issued in Oregon in 2010, an increase of only one from the year before. Loan interest made by pawnbrokers, however, has increased by over 16 percent from 2009 to 2010. Pawn shops have always had the unique ability to thrive during depressions and recessions, offering a place for short-term loans that don’t involve a bank and where a person’s last luxuries can be turned into temporary income.
Needless to say, the job of a pawnbroker requires some strong emotional barriers in dealing professionally with those who are down on their luck.
“I miss helping people like that, but you can’t help everybody,” Barkley says. “It’s sad. It becomes an emotional thing after a while. I loved [pawning] because I love people. But it could be me on the other side of the counter.”
Hatch, similarly, has had to put professionalism over patronage for the good of his business.
“Unfortunately, you have people that are really falling on hard times, and are just bringing in garbage and wanting loans on it,” he says. “It’s stuff that Goodwill would throw away. Your heart goes out to them, but you just can’t help everybody.”
 

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