Author: DougR
Date: 2020-01-14 02:30
I'm going to venture a guess (and that's all it is) that 2 things have led to the demise of pawn shops (and here I draw on observations along 8th Ave. NYC, where there used to be 4 or 5 pawnshops between 34th St. and 59th St. and now there's ... none). One is the rise of internet sales, and "that site" in particular, which (like Amazon in terms of book sales) has perhaps driven brick-and-mortar shops out of business; the second (and this maybe only applies to urban areas) is a skyrocketing in real estate prices and retail rents, that have driven not only pawn shops, but dry cleaners, bodegas, cobblers, tailors and other kinds of non-chain mom & pop stores out of business or sent them far off the beaten track.
There may be other factors as well; to the extent that pawn shops depended on a certain amount of traffic in stolen merchandise, and burglary rates in urban areas having declined somewhat, there may be less merchandise available; also obviously pawnshop owners may have counted on people not knowing the value of their own merchandise, and with online stores available to use as price-checkers, that's no longer the case either.
That's my best guess. Yard/estate sales and the local Goodwill or Salvation Army seem like better bets.
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