bassbully said:
Bassbully, they ask outright if you want to pawn or sell, there is a difference. In this instance, the customer wanted to trade even up (sell), he had no intention of coming back for the bass.
When you pawn, an interest rate and time frame to pay back the "loan" is set up. When you fail to fulfill the obligation, the item in question becomes the property of the pawn shop. When you sell an item, they hand you the cash and the item becomes the property of the pawn shop then and there.
In this instance, the customer wanted to trade (sell) one item for another, even up, with no intention of retrieving the traded item (hence, it wasn't a pawn). By refusing the trade, but then buying the item for fifty dollars more than the trade value, the pawn shop lost fifty bucks. There is no possible recovery of fees to make up the loss.
I got my 1973 Fender P bass [Which I still have] in 1975 at a pawn shop for $100
) I get a lot of "what would you pay for x_item?" phone calls when there's something they can't find sold on eBay, and every now and then when one of those items defaults to the shop I'll get another call asking if I want it. A couple of the seemingly to-good-to-be-true finds that came my way- a Moog device I was already shopping for, serial #0001, an array of drum microphones formerly (and quite verifiably) owned by Mickey Hart, and all sorts of miscellaneous music gear for a good 25% under what one would spend on eBay- lots of easy gambles on weird pedals and the like. The thing to do is check in frequently, they're in the business of pricing stuff to move so the good deals don't generally sit on the shelf waiting to get noticed... especially nowadays where anyone with a smartphone can do a quick lookup to see what's worth what!
