One of my buddies let another friend of ours borrow a guitar. This guy is one of those dudes that means well, but is just dumb. He reminds me of a mentally slow dog. You just can’t seem to get angry at him because he is so damn stupid and genuinely doesn’t understand he has done wrong.
My friend went to get his guitar back, and the guy says, “oh, that’s at the pawn shop.” WHAT?!?!?!?! My friend went through the roof, and of course the mentally deficient friend says, “I get paid in a few days, no big deal, I will get it out.” My friend tells him to give him the paper to get it from the shop.
My friend calls me and asks for a ride. Turns out the pawn shop is in San Francisco. No pawn shops in our area. So, we cross the bridge and go to the pawn shop. We arrive, and go to this hole in the wall. He presents the paper work and says he wants to get his guitar. They look at it, and say, “we sold this loan to another pawn shop, here is their address.” (This sounds super shady to me) so, we drive across the city and go to the other pawn shop. He presents the paper work and they tell him, “yes, we have that, but it’s expired.” He looks at the paperwork and tells them it is not expired, it says he has another 3 weeks. They tell him, “our policy is 3 months.” My friend tells them it says 4 months in his paperwork. They tell him they have a different policy and that theirs is 3 months. He says they have to honor the original contract, and they say that they don’t honor other people’s contracts.
They won’t budge. It’s a 90s Les Paul, I think it was a precursor to the 59 reissues? Anyhow, it was worth a few grand according to my friend. Our friend pawned it for $40 because he wanted groceries and only asked for a small amount of cash.
This pawn shop would not budge no matter what. It was crazy. I think it’s a scam they do with the other pawn shop.
My friend was obviously pissed off beyond words. He vowed that he would burn the pawn shop to the ground, then decided to go to the rip off report on the local evening news, and eventually decided he was going to hunt down the owners of both pawn shops and mercilessly beat them to within inches of their worthless, shady lives.
Sadly, he ended up doing nothing and accepted the loss. I think the owner of the first pawn shop picked up on how slow and dim witted our friend who initially pawned the guitar was and decided he could basically steal the guitar via their “sold loan,” pawn scam.