License to Pawn: Deals, Steals, and My Life at the Gold & Silver

by Rick Harrison

  The top sword is my samurai sword that has been dated back to 1490. It presents one of the most vexing issues of my career: There is a chip in the blade that will cost $6,000 to $8,000 to repair, but the act of repairing the chip could crack the blade and render it worthless.

  Known affectionately by me as a “Loser’s Ring,” this Oakland Athletics American League Championship ring was sold to me by a staff member. Even staff members’ rings are valuable; I’m asking $11,000.

  A Fire-Chief gas pump is cool Americana, and people love to buy them for their game rooms. I try to get one or two a year. This one is from the late 1940s or early 1950s, and here’s an interesting fact: Its highest setting is 35.9 cents per gallon.

  This Remington pearl-handled revolver is a cute little girl gun that shoots .22 caliber bullets and dates back to the 1870s. It was manufactured for a lady to carry in her purse.

  This small, .22 caliber Derringer double-barreled revolver dates back to the 1860s or 1870s. Because of their age, people automatically believe they are worth a lot of money, but they weren’t expensive when they were made and they still aren’t. They made a ton of them, and since people don’t throw away guns, there are a ton of them still on the market. This one’s yours for $100.

  This is a rare item that also happens to be incredibly cool: a target pistol kit from the 1830s. This kit contains everything you could possibly need for these pistols. It was a rich man’s toy, found by a construction worker in an attic. I’m asking $9,800.

  CHAPTER 8

  Rick’s Rules of Negotiation

  1. You’ve got to be able to walk away: You can’t fall in love with something. You can’t decide that you’re going to buy this thing no matter what because you’ve decided you can’t live without it. Negotiating to purchase an item should not be an emotional process. It’s analytical, and a lot of factors have to be considered in a short amount of time. I have to consider how long it’s going to take me to sell it, how big the potential market for it is, how much I can reasonably expect to get for it. It goes well beyond saying, “It’s worth a thousand dollars and he’ll take five hundred, so I have to buy it.”

  2. It’s just stuff: You can live without it. You have up to this point in your life, so there’s no reason to believe you can’t go on living a happy and fulfilling life without the thing that’s sitting in front of you. There are many times when I’ve come across something that I really, really wanted, but that little voice in my head keeps repeating those three magic words: It’s. Just. Stuff. And you know what? It is. It’s just disposable, superficial stuff. Some of it’s really cool, though, so you have to be careful.

  3. Don’t tip your hand: If you can tell from the moment you start talking price that the other person is going to capitulate, there are no negotiations. Rule No. 1 applies to both the buyer and the seller. If the seller shows he is not willing to walk away, if he indicates through body language or words that he absolutely has to get this done, he’s yours. He’s also lost money.

  4. Never give the first number: After the story has been established, it’s time to move on to price. The preemptive question is always the same: “What are you looking to get out of it?” Get their number first. Information is power, and getting this information first is extremely powerful. It allows you to know whether the person knows what he has and whether he’s realistic about what he can get for it. As a buyer, you don’t want to run the risk of coming in first with a high price. You might be telling the other guy something about his item that he doesn’t know, and it’s important to remember that it’s not your job to educate the customer. It’s his stuff, and it’s his job to do the research that gives him the best chance to maximize his profits. At all costs, get their number first.

  5. Never have a harsh negotiation: Laugh, joke around, be their friend. Engage them in the item—that’s why I always ask for the story behind it. I want to get some personal information out of the seller and a better feel for where the seller is coming from. That allows me to play off the information—family history, etc.—and make him or her feel more comfortable. If you’re joking and laughing, you’re their friend. Then when it comes to negotiating a price, it’s no longer simply a business proposition. The tone changes. Now it’s more like “Hey, help a buddy out.” And they’ll feel better about taking less.

  One of the best ways to learn how to negotiate is to study it. I’m always the buyer on the television show, but I have spent my share of time on the other side of the counter. It’s not as much fun, I can tell you that.

  I have made many trips to the diamond district in L.A. to sell my diamonds. If I find myself in possession of a very large or valuable diamond, I have no choice but to head to L.A. and negotiate with the best there is. And there is no doubt who owns that title: The Hasidic Jews in the diamond district are the best negotiators in the world.

  They will look at a diamond for three hours. They can learn everything in the world they need to know about the diamond in three minutes. They’re smart; they do this all day and they do it better than anyone. Doesn’t matter. They look for any angle or edge they can get, and then they exploit it until you show them you are either going to hold your ground or cave in.

  The Gemological Institute of America provides the ratings for diamonds, and the GIA is the absolute gold standard in the business. What they say goes. If you have anyone but the GIA grade your diamond, the grade you get is worthless. The GIA rules.

  Well, not always. I have had the guys in the diamond district argue with me about GIA ratings. They know I have no counter to their argument except to say, “Come on, dude—it’s the GIA.” They don’t care. They don’t care at all. If you falter or don’t know your stuff, you’re done. They will eat you alive.

  It’s like a hostage situation. They’re the most patient people I’ve ever encountered, and they will always wait you out. I’ve learned a lot from them, although my tactics might be a little different. For one thing, they surely aren’t interested in Rule #5, the one about making sure every negotiation is a friendly one. That’s not their game.

  I had a diamond that was D-VVS I, which meant it was one grade away from flawless. The GIA rating sheet included cutting instructions on how to make it flawless. I sent it to a local diamond cutter and sent it back to GIA and they said it still wasn’t flawless. I had him cut it again and they said it still wasn’t flawless.

  OK, so now I’m $14,000 into this one diamond, and I’m getting a little pissed off. Every time it gets cut it takes a little off the diamond, too, and diamonds are priced by the ounce. So I’m losing every which way on this diamond that might be the most amazing and perfect diamond I will ever see.

  I took it to Los Angeles and went through two days of negotiations. I was dealing with three different guys. I dealt with the first guy for six hours. Six hours. And another was three hours. And then the third was six more hours. That type of negotiation is based on one thing: time.

  They look at you and say, “I’ll give you a hundred dollars.”

  “No, that’s not going to work.”

  “OK, let me look at it again.”

  So they take it back, roll it over in their hands for about ten minutes, and then say, “I’ll give you a hundred dollars.”

  “I told you, that’s not going to work.”

  “OK, let me look at it again. . . . I’ll give you a hundred dollars.”

  It’s endless, and it’s tedious, but damn if it isn’t effective. I’ve been in there and said, “I need to use a restroom.”

  “Sorry, we don’t have one.”

  “Wait, you don’t have a restroom on this entire floor?”

  “No, we don’t.”

  So you’re standing there, knowing they’re messing with you to get the diamond for the price they want to pay. You don’t want to give in, but the reality of the situation is, you have to pee. It’s like a hostage negotiation with these guys. They know all the tricks, and they’ll use them without a second thought. Their job is to
get what they want for the least amount possible, and damned if they aren’t great at it.

  They come into our shop, too. I’ll deal with them, Corey will deal with them, and I’ve had Tracy deal with them. (She even told one of them we didn’t have a restroom after hearing my stories.) But if they show up and Old Man is behind the counter, he kicks them out.

  A diamond dealer walks in to talk to Old Man, they’re gone. He knows how good they are, and he knows he doesn’t have the patience to deal with them. If you know you can’t win, sometimes it’s best not to play the game.

  If you’re not familiar with the pawn business and you watch Pawn Stars, you might come away with the impression that we never give people enough money for their stuff. It’s a common complaint: Someone comes into the shop with a rare and unusual item, they say they want $4,000 for it, and they end up walking out with half that. If they say they saw it for $4,500 on eBay, people believe that’s what it’s worth and in the end I look like I’m cheating someone.

  For one thing, telling me what someone is asking for an item on eBay doesn’t mean anything to me. I’ve made millions of dollars in eBay sales, so I know you can ask anything you want on eBay. You can put a Happy Meal toy on eBay for $10,000, but that doesn’t mean you should come into my shop and tell me you have the exact same Happy Meal toy and you’re looking to get $10,000 for it.

  The first thing I have to consider when I’m looking at a piece is how long it’s going to take to resell it. It might be the coolest thing in the world, but if it’s going to take three or four years to sell, its value immediately decreases for my purposes. There are times when someone brings me an antique firearm that I know I can turn around and sell immediately to someone in my network of collectors. In that case, I’ll be willing to pay more money. But if it’s something I can’t sell immediately, I’m less willing to part with top dollar just to have it in the shop.

  There are different rules for regular items and commodities. If someone walks in with a handful of Krugerrands (South African one-ounce gold pieces), they don’t have to be held for thirty days. They don’t have serial numbers like currency, so there’s really no way of telling whether they’re stolen or not. And gold is one of the few guarantees in this business. I can sell them the next day, and there will always be a market for them.

  The price of gold as I write is $1,340 an ounce. We routinely pay $1,300 for a Krugerrand and make forty bucks because it’s a guaranteed sale.

  I don’t have that with some weird antiques or a Picasso or a Denny Dent painting of Jim Morrison. I have to be smart about something like that, because I look at it and factor in how long it’s going to take me to sell the thing. So if I think I can eventually get three thousand for it, you’re getting twelve hundred. If it takes me three to five years to sell it, I’m not going to give you an auction-house price on it.

  I hear it all the time. You’re giving those people almost nothing for their stuff. If something’s worth five thousand bucks, how can you justify giving them only two thousand? You’re fleecing people.

  It works the other way, too. There are times when I will look at an item and mentally prepare myself to pay ten thousand bucks. I saunter up to the customer, smile, and say, “Hey, there. What are you looking to get out of this?”

  And they say, “Oh, man, I’d really like to get nine hundred bucks.”

  So that’s another moral dilemma. Most of the time I don’t believe it’s my job to educate the seller on his or her property, but there are times when my conscience gets the best of me. Once—and we used this on a show—a woman came in with a one-of-a-kind Fabergé spider. Given the age and the amazing quality of the work, I believe it was made by Peter Fabergé himself.

  She had no idea she was holding an item that could be worth upward of $20,000. No idea at all. I looked at her and laughed a little, but I came clean. She was thinking it might be worth $1,000, but she was even flimsy with that. When I outlined the history and rarity of it, her eyes kept getting bigger and bigger.

  She left the shop with twelve grand in her pocket after coming in with no expectations. She was a lot happier walking out than walking in.

  People are free to think what they want about me and my business, but remember this: I have to make a profit, and I have to figure out the best way to make a profit. And if you don’t want to accept two thousand for your five-thousand-dollar painting, you’re free to walk out that door with it under your arm.

  I always say I never know what’s going to come through that door, and the opposite is true, too: I never know what’s going to walk out that door, either.

  CHAPTER 9

  Big Hoss

  I never thought my life was very interesting until we got a television show. Until then, I was just a big dude rolling through life, working for my dad and my grandpa in a pawn shop in Vegas. Then TV shows up and everything changes. I guess I’m interesting now.

  A pawn shop used to be the last place anybody wanted to end up in Vegas. Think about it: Anywhere but there, right? If you found yourself in a pawn shop, either something went horribly wrong or you were desperate. Neither one is a good outcome.

  Thanks to television and a store full of unique and unusual items, we’ve come a long way. It’s crazy—now we’re a tourist destination. People get off the plane and come directly to the shop. We’re mainstream now. The first mainstream pawn shop. It makes me shake my head just thinking about it.

  I have an assistant. That’s the craziest thing I’ve ever heard. I have a personal assistant who helps me keep my schedule straight and sets up stuff around my house. If we need a new refrigerator, I send him over to my house to wait for it. It’s a different world now. If you had told me three or four years ago that I’d have a personal assistant, I would have laughed at you.

  No, that’s not completely correct. I wouldn’t have laughed at you. Laughing means I would have thought it was a possibility. Instead, I think I would have looked at you like you were crazy, because that’s what you would have been. Bat-shit crazy.

  I spent the biggest part of my teenage years as a nasty drug addict. From the time I was fifteen till just after my twentieth birthday in 2003, I couldn’t have been farther from the world I’m living in now. There was no money, no fame, no glamour.

  Crystal meth is the worst shit in the world. It’s the nastiest, meanest, most insidious drug ever invented. It swept through Las Vegas like a hot wind and picked up a ton of people along the way.

  Ruined a lot of lives.

  Almost ruined mine.

  I can’t really pinpoint how or why I started using. It didn’t really seem like a considered decision on my part. When I was growing up, there wasn’t always a lot of money flowing through our house. My dad and grandpa worked hard and long to make Gold & Silver Pawn a profitable enterprise, but there weren’t always television cameras watching them peel off stacks of hundreds to buy rare and valuable items. Put it this way: Growing up, we ate English muffins for dinner more than once. We lived in a blue-collar neighborhood, where both parents had to work to make ends meet. My dad worked constantly, and while I was growing up my mom—she’s not my biological mom, but Tracy is my real mom—worked the counter in the shop with him.

  And it just seems like I woke up one day and everybody I hung out with was doing meth. Chumlee was one of my best buds in the neighborhood—he started doing it. My brother, Adam, started doing it. And so did I.

  Once meth hit, it hit big. It ran through my neighborhood and my friends and people my age in a way that nobody could have guessed. It created a whole generation of people who engaged in what I call “face gymnastics.” Their lips and cheeks and noses twitched and twisted constantly, as if they were swishing something around in their mouths or trying to stop an itch without using their hands.

  I can tell when tweakers walk into the shop—and, believe me, a lot of them do—by watching how their faces move. Back, forth, up, down. That’s before they open their toothless mouths and remove all doubt.
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  What a terrible life. I couch-surfed through life for those five years, living here and there, often not knowing where I was going to end up from night to night. I slept in a friend’s trailer or in my truck or not at all. I stayed awake for two straight weeks one time. It should have been enough to kill me, but it wasn’t.

  Those two weeks are like a black hole in my memory. You’d think it would be easy to remember something that epic—a two-week binge with no sleep?—but I can’t. It wasn’t a social time. It was demented and depraved and sad. That whole time in my life is like a blur. I don’t remember details, only broad outlines of what I did and where I was. It’s like you lose time. I would sit in that trailer and do meth nonstop, the whole time wondering when and where we could get more. I had nothing, I did nothing, I was nothing.

  My whole world revolved around the drug. I scoped out places to park my truck and sleep when I needed to. One day I found a car wash that gave me the perfect cover, and I thought it was a huge accomplishment. I could drive to the back behind the car-wash tunnel, lie across the front seat and sleep without anybody being able to see me. The way my life was at the time, that was a big score.

  It’s like crank was put on the earth for one reason: to make you want more. We did it just to do it, and after a while we’d do it just to feel normal. It became the new normal in my life, the one thing I could count on and understand. That’s when you know it has completely taken over your life. It sinks its hooks into you and doesn’t let go. You want to do it and don’t care what the consequences are. You feel naked without it.