Judge Judy Show

In bad times, pawn shops busy

GREENSBORO — They promise fast cash, easy terms and friendly service.

More than banks, more than any other lender, they offer a lifeline to the average guy who overspent his paycheck, pension or unemployment and just needs a few bucks to get by.

Yes, pawn shops have an unsavory reputation going back generations. But they fill a niche, and they’ve sprung up in unprecedented numbers across Greensboro.

Pawn brokers attribute their increased visibility to the rotten economy, skyrocketing gold prices and the industry’s glamorization on such TV reality shows as “Pawn Stars” and “Hardcore Pawn.”

“The people we help are not bad people. They are not foolish or destitute,” said Wayne Nixon, dean of local pawn brokers with 28 years in the business. “A lot of what we see is just the result of bad money management or bad luck.”

The city boasts 16 pawn shops these days, up from a dozen over the last several years. Nixon recalls a time 20 years back when his was the only shop in town. Today’s assortment runs the gamut, from mom-and-pops to regional or statewide chains to Cash America, an international corporation with $1.5 billion in assets and more than 700 stores across the United States.

The shops, which line such corridors as South Elm-Eugene and West Market streets, vary widely in look and feel. They encompass the overstuffed ambience of Nixon’s B&W Pawn in an old bank building on East Bessemer Avenue to the more modern decor of Cash America, Money Unlimited or Quick Cash in strip shopping centers.

Nixon and wife Cleta run an old-style shop. Here sits an outboard motor, there a row of power tools, there a big bin of ratchet sockets.

Then there’s Cash America, with its brightly-lit front counter lined by a half-dozen teller windows that look out on mall-style displays featuring the latest in laptop computers, game systems and other trendy electronics.

'Got to pay the rent’

You don’t speak long with owners before hearing about a new category of pawn-shop customer in recent years — the buttoned-down professional or stately grandma battling hard times in a way they’d never have considered in their wildest dreams before the recession.

“They say, 'I’ve got to pay the mortgage or the rent.’ Or they’ll say, 'I’m without a job right now.’ I hear that a lot,” said Lisa Johnson McMillan of Spring Garden Jewelry and Loan, whose shop deals exclusively in jewelry. “There have been a lot of pay decreases, too. You’ll hear someone say, 'I used to sell 12 cars a month, now it’s just two.

Clarity, From The Judge Judy Show

I don’t watch the show. I just had somebody e-mail me with the link to that disaster.

There’s a very easy way to eliminate the majority of these types of cases. Easy, and cheap as it happens.

Cut ‘em off. No more free money. You want to live? Get a job and work for a living. Want an education? Put yourself through school. That probably means a hell of a lot less Women’s Studies and Comparative Lit majors and more doctors and engineers. Which is a feature, rather than a bug.

Dumb-ass Duane from the Judge Judy clip isn’t some freak of nature. There are shocking numbers of kids out there who have that exact entitled, zoned-out mentality and who have been told practically from birth how special they are. It’s those coddled dopes who turned out en masse to vote for Obama in 2008; they were mainlining his “we are the ones we’ve been waiting for” bilge, since it was the same therapeutic delusionary rhetoric they’d been fed since pre-school.

Except life has a way of treating you just like Judge Judy treated Duane. There are no jobs for goofballs with Women’s Studies and Comparative Lit degrees anymore, and as our economy burns to the ground we find that insipid self-deception like he displays in front of the TV judge serves as outstanding kindling. Amid the misery, that stuff is the first to go.

You can whine and bitch about how your life was better when you’d mortgaged yourself to the hilt to be a full-time student taking crip courses in an easy major divorced from the real world, but ultimately you’re going to have to grow up and recognize the only way up the ladder is real work. If that means digging a ditch or washing dishes or turning a wrench, or whatever other job you thought was beneath you when you were doing bong hits and taking a survey course on Sylvia Plath or Queer Musicology, then so be it. Eventually you’ll recognize you’re only special based on what you contribute. Unfortunately for Duane, conversations with equally irresponsible and gullible females doesn’t signify a contribution.

And that recognition? Guess what we call that, Duane.

Adulthood.

We are going into the tank as a country. This is, despite the best efforts of our media propagandists, the Obama depression.

And we’re about to have a lot more adults in America than we had just a few years ago, whether Duane becomes one of them or not.

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