Pawnshop activity to be cleaned up
It seems that to skirt the rules, pawnshop folks have been making deals out in their parking lots. The city is cracking down on this dubious behaviour to cut back on the fencing of stolen goods that happens this way.
Ephraim 10:24 on 2019-10-29 Permalink
Break the law, get a slap on the hand. When you look at the fines, it certainly isn’t enough to discourage it. Want to really discourage it? When you are found to violate the law, your inventory needs to be checked, with an hour charge for the person who is doing the checking. Any stolen goods are seized, on the spot, with no remuneration. So, they are fined, have the store checked at their own expense and lose the stolen merchandise…. and the manager or owner, who bought the goods, should be charged with receiving stolen goods…. you need to make it unprofitable to even contemplate buying fenced goods. (Pawn shops are already one of the most abusive businesses around… you don’t need to make them more profitable by letting them commit crime).
Michael Black 11:08 on 2019-10-29 Permalink
I recall reading a long time back that pawnshops pretty much disappeared in Montreal. I think a Gazette article was about the one that remained. So if I remember that right, they’ve obviously made a comeback.
There’s that one on St. Lawrence that sells DVDs outside during the street festival, that seems less like a pawnshop as we know it. More a line of used items. From the looks of it, same with one near Guy.
There was a recent CBC story where a musician’s car was broken into and they stole her guitar. She found it in a pawnshop, but had to buy it back “because the owner bought it in good faith”.
Michael
walkerp 11:54 on 2019-10-29 Permalink
How can you tell if a pawn shop is legimately selling used items or stolen ones? I bought a jigsaw from the one on St-Laurent years ago and then a contractor I know said you never should buy tools from those places as they are almost always stolen. I haven’t been back since but they have some tempting things in the window…
Michael Black 12:21 on 2019-10-29 Permalink
I have no idea. Just avoiding those places would work. Maybe the thing to do is avoid expensive items. Those might not be stolen, but you don’t reward someone if they are. Things with low prices might be stolen too but are less likely to be missed. Not that that legitimizes something, but buying it won’t take it out of view like expensive items where the owner might go looking for it.
Pawnshops of course used to have a legit purposs,providing a small loan in return for some collateral. After a certain time, if the owner didn’t reclaim it, the store could sell the item to get their money back. Of course that was abused, even decades ago tv shows had pawnshops as places to fence goods.
Buf my impression, I’ve never gone in one, is that they’ve become more !ike used stores, nobody ciming back to reclaim the items, just a source of fast cash. That may increase the number of stolen items.
Michael
Kate 12:22 on 2019-10-29 Permalink
Michael, the old pawnshops along St-Antoine went away when the Palais de congrès was built, but there are ones on a lot of corners around town. Yellow signs, as a rule. You won’t see them in Westmount, mind you.
Ephraim 15:44 on 2019-10-29 Permalink
There are plenty of them. They basically charge about 20% or more for a month and give you less than 50c on the dollar, unless it’s gold… they love gold. And you can buy your stuff back for up to 30 days, and can pay just the interest to keep it held for another 30 days.
They have a special booklet where they have to write down the serial numbers and description of goods for the police. If it’s stolen, they still get paid something. And they are supposed to keep legal IDs of everything they purchase. Hence the parking lot thing… to get around IDs, holding the items, reporting them, etc.
They buy those DVDs from people in stacks for almost nothing. But then again, what am I to say… I don’t even own a DVD player.
Mr.Chinaski 11:21 on 2019-10-30 Permalink
I have to say… pawnshops are pretty much the only place in town to find used left-handed guitars 🙁