We’ve reached the peak shopping season of the year. The time between Thanksgiving and Christmas is the biggest month of the year for many retail businesses and online stores. You can expect billions of dollars to be spent on gifts in the United States at retail stores—in fact, tens of billions of dollars will be spent on Black Friday weekend alone.
While most people tend to think of this shopping season as primarily affecting retail stores, it’s important to note that there are other types of stores that can see a bump during this time of year, and you can find just as good of deals, if not better, at these businesses. Chief among them are pawn shops in Olathe, KS and elsewhere.
There are thousands of pawn shops around the country—the best estimate available is at least 15,000. Each year, pawn shops report extremely strong sales during the holiday shopping season. This has always been a strong time of year for sales at pawn shops, but especially since the pawn industry came under the microscope in a series of reality-based television shows on channels like TLC. Sales numbers for pawn shops on Black Friday and beyond have increased significantly over where they were a decade or two ago.
Holiday shopping at pawn stores
So, what is it that brings in so many shoppers to pawn stores during the holidays? We already mentioned the explosion of TV shows like “Pawn Stars” that took off during the height of the recession, when people were looking to shop for items more frugally. This greater national exposure helped change the perception of pawn shops from being seedy or unapproachable to being something much more comfortable and palatable to mainstream audiences. People who might never have entered pawn shops before were suddenly doing so with much more confidence, and without worrying about what used to be the stigma associated with buying and selling at these shops.
Now, visiting pawn shops is seen as a thrifty, intelligent way to purchase used goods that can make for great gifts. It’s also a handy way for people to make some money they can use for their holiday shopping by selling off items they no longer need or want in their homes. The attraction is much the same as using eBay, Craigslist or Facebook marketplace to buy or sell items. When you consider how much money people tend to spend during the holiday season on gifts, it makes sense that people would seek out less-expensive ways of getting the items they want.
There’s also something a bit more personal about finding a unique item at a pawn shop versus purchasing a mass-produced item from your local big box store or from Amazon. At a pawn shop, every item has a story, and people are very intentional about picking out items at these stores that make them think of the gift recipients.
Interested in doing some of your holiday shopping at a pawn shop in Olathe, KS this year? Stop by Harrison Street Pawn today and we’ll be happy to assist you.