Go for the Gold (and Guns)

Who cares what tie-wearing Wall Streeters are buying and selling? The people bearing the brunt of the economic
collapse aren’t hawking stocks in New York. Instead, what
people are choosing to buy, sell, and say over the counters of Portland’s pawnshops paints a more revealing picture of city life in
the Great Recession than any high-finance graph.

“Last year, I heard
a lot of ‘I need money for gas,'” says jovial Hal Hallmark, who runs
the relatively upscale SE 82nd Avenue resale store Stuff. “But now
people don’t seem to need an excuse.” Trading cash for valuables,
pawnshop workers are troves of anecdotal evidence about the nature of
Portland’s economy.

• Photo by Scott Toepfer

“Like a bartender, we listen,” says Josh Oller, the manager of
Silver Lining Jewelry and Loan on NE Sandy. “You try to put yourself on
the other side of the counter and do what [you] can to help
people.”

• Photo by Scott Toepfer

As headlines blare economic uncertainty for America, Portlanders
return to trusting in the nation’s more reliable founding fathers: gold
and guns. Anything gold is a good investment at pawnshops in town. Last
year, says Oller—the Silver Lining’s gem expert—gold sold
for around $600 an ounce. This March an ounce went for $900.

• Photo by Scott Toepfer

“People lose faith in the dollar, they want to grab something,” says
Oller, leaning over a glass case of flashy gold rings. “It’s easier to
part with items when you need money,” notes Traci Jenkins, co-owner of
Ace’s Quick Cash on SE Division.

• Photo by Scott Toepfer

Almost as precious as gold these days are guns. Unlike iPods and
Xboxes and Beaverton mansions, guns never depreciate in value. The
young and friendly Cassie Hilderbrant is the gun expert on hand at
Hawker’s Lockers on NE 82nd Avenue.

“Guns, everybody’s looking for guns,” says Hilderbrant, relating a
conversation she had with a man last fall who wanted to buy a gun
before the “Barackalypse.” Hilderbrant pulls her favorite weapon out
from the back—a $1,200 semi-automatic “Bushmaster.”

“Young guys come in here and drool over the guns,” Hilderbrant
laughs, cocking the unloaded Bushmaster.

Other top sellers at Portland pawnshops these days are laptops,
iPods, jewelry, and DVDs.

“I hate iPods, I hate ’em,” gripes Hilderbrant, groaning about the
hassle of buying iPods from people appalled at the current buying price
of about $40—at Hawker’s Lockers a 120 GB iPod classic resells
for $60. “People like to yell at us, that’s our job,” Hilderbrant adds
with a smile. Laptops and iPods are usually snapped up in less than a
week at Stuff and Ace’s Quick Cash.

Cultural thinkers have opined recently that America’s economic
collapse may lead to a backlash against the nation’s highly materialist
culture. Even MTV debated this season whether to can consumerist-crazed
shows like My Super Sweet 16. But at Portland pawnshops, people
are still spending money on little luxuries—they’re just spending
less money. While people used to head to Best Buy, an increasing number
now head to the pawnshop.

“People still want to go out and buy stuff, even in a down economy,”
says Oller at Silver Lining. “The biggest change we’ve seen is more
people coming in for the very first time. For a long time it was upper,
lower, or middle class. Now the lines are getting blurred.”

Ace’s Quick Cash has been seeing a lot of new faces, too. “We have
people who come in saying, ‘I thought I’d never have to pawn something
off,'” says owner Jenkins. Pawnshop clerks agree: Wealthier people
bring in better goods. Rolexes and Tiffany rings roll through pawnshop
doors along with lawnmowers and record players.

The vast back hallways of Silver Lining are stuffed with such
treasures. Two hundred and fifty guitars stretch across one room, and
in another flat-screen TVs are lined up like sliced bread. Around one
corner is a pinball machine and a ship’s cannon, around another an
arrowhead collection and dozens of bikes. All these objects are
connected only because some Portlander somewhere was banking on them to
pay rent.

In the middle of the maze, behind two heavy metal drawers, sits a
safe full of tiny diamonds tucked into bland manila envelopes. “We get
a lot of stuff in here, and it’s not just people lookin’ to pay a $25
light bill,” says Oller, who navigates the mishmash of beloved items
with ease. “Most of our customers are just like you and me:
middle-class Americans living paycheck to paycheck. But we’ve done a
$30-40,000 loan for people flipping houses.”

Pawnshops are highly regulated in Oregon, so banish the image of
price-gouging hucksters of stolen goods. Instead, clerks fill out a
contract with every seller and check police reports scrupulously. The
back rooms of pawnshops around town have shelves of bicycles and
jewelry caught up in police investigations. At Silver Lining, an old
man with a parrot on his shoulder leans up to the gated cashier window
as a worker explains that pawning is a mini-loan. This loan is one of
150 the store will make on an average day in March, trading cash for
goods with 6,000 customers during the month.

The state caps interest on pawned items at three percent a month and
most people who drop off rings, guns, and televisions come back within
90 days to reclaim them. But pawnshops around town agree that the
percent of people returning to collect their pawned items has dropped
in recent months. Hawker’s Lockers is seeing a pinch. Paper bags full
of cast-off PlayStation 2s are starting to take up too much space.

With an influx of people looking for fast cash and less people
reclaiming their items, pawnshops around town are getting pickier.

“We’ve tightened up our belt on what we’ll buy,” says Jenkins at
Ace’s Quick Cash. Off the list: snowboards, film cameras, and cheap
tools. With 18 percent of the construction industry unemployed in
Portland, piles of top-line tools have accumulated on the floors of
resale stores.

After Hilderbrant returns the semi-automatic Bushmaster to the back
room, a young woman opens the door to Hawker’s Lockers and pulls a ring
off her finger, hoping to sell it. Hilderbrant places a magnifying
glass up to her eye and examines the ring for a moment.

“You’re not going to like me,” she says, handing the ring back and
offering five dollars. The ring contains only one gram of gold and so
the woman returns it to her finger and leaves the store… for now.