My family business was the pawn business when I was growing up. charleym3 is absolutely right that cash offers a special purchasing power. While you can haggle over prices in a pawn shop, impasses in negotiation often result when the broker won't come down further on a price and the customer won't come up. Even worse tends to be when a price is negotiated, sometimes for quite a while, and the customer then says he doesn't have money and will go get it. Probably 8 times out of 10, they don't return. In short, our time was wasted. The customer often had no intention in buying. He just wanted to see how low he could get the price as a sort of game. This really sucked when somebody was dead set on negotiating the absolute bottom dollar on some knick-knack $20 item and then didn't buy it.
One thing that I saw work from both sides of the counter was the issue of cash. Sometimes we would agree to a price if the customer had cash money right then and there for the product. No checks, no credit cards, and no layaway, just payment in full with cash. As such, many got good deals. The other side of the coin was to have a customer make a final offer lower than our previous offer, but punctuate his offer by counting out the cash and laying it on the counter. This shows that the customer is negotiating in good faith and will back up his offer with cash. Such a display, especially for higher ticket items, was often very convincing.
The reasons why this ploy tended to work well is that it showed the transaction could be settled immediately and would put cash money into the till that would be readily available to use as loan money to other customers wanting to pawn items. So as long as we could still make some profit, and if it was at a time when our cash flow might not have been too good, a large ticket cash sale could work out well for both us and the customer. Few things worse can happen business-wise in a pawn shop than to not have money on hand to loan to customers.
To this I would also add that often the very best deals in a pawn shop are when the broker does not have a full appreciation or understanding of the product for sale and puts it out for sale well below market value. No doubt the broker will still profit on the item, but no where near as well as he would have if he had known the true value and had customers to buy it at that high value.
Frenchy brings up another good point. I don't know of any pawn brokers who will immediately tell a customer the absolute lowest amount they will take for an item just because the customer asked for the bottom dollar amount. By asking, "What's the lowest you will take?" the customer basically is telling the broker that he doesn't want to pay the asking price (which is fine), but that he also isn't willing to come up with an offer himself. Essentially, the guy is fishing and probably isn't all that serious as a potential buyer. The other problem is that if the broker does tell what his bottom dollar amount is (real or not), it will almost always be countered by a lower number from the customer. In other words, the customer is trying to negotiate a better deal than what the broker has already told him is the bottom dollar amount. What this shows is that the customer isn't willing to operate in good faith on the deal and that he obviously does not believe the broker because he offers an amount less than what the broker already said was bottom dollar. How this breaks down is that the customer sees the asking price, but does not want to make a counter offer. He instead asks for a bottom dollar amount. Essentially, he is asking the broker to negotiate against himself to lower the amount with ZERO commitment on the customer's behalf.
So as in Frenchy's example, the counter by the broker making the customer place an actual $$ offer then becomes what is actually the counter offer to the original asking price. The nice thing about this is that if the customer offers what they are actually willing to pay, they make get lucky if that amount is within the broker's window of acceptance. If there is additional counter offering until a price is finally settled, it will quite likely be for less money than whatever the broker would have immediately told the customer was his bottom dollar amount. And the reason why the bottom dollar amount that would have originally been quoted would not have actually been the bottom dollar amount the broker would take is because the broker knows the customer is going to counter with some amount less than the broker's stated bottom dollar.
As said, "Money talks and bullstuffing walks."
For more information, see
http://www.thefiringline.com/forums/showthread.php?s=&threadid=118886&highlight=pawn
you never know.
