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Comment by PaulHoule | Hacker News Reader

"Pawnshop" is the wrong word. A "Pawnshop" takes your goods for collateral and loans you money. A "fence" is somebody who helps thieves sell stolen goods.

A pawnshop might be a front for fencing, but Amazon doesn't function as a pawnshop at all.

[This comment was a reaction to the title of this post, which was fortunately changed.]

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They're not great places to take stolen goods either, at least not generically, for anything with a serial number or distinct characteristics. Every item that get's pawned or sold in a store goes into a searchable database like LeadsOnline [0]. My family owns a number of pawn shops and we got a very low number of stolen items, the most common was someone stealing from family.

[0] https://www.leadsonline.com/main/index.php

100%. Pawnshops are basically high interest collateral loan shops. This is saying that Amazon is a fencing operation. But then again this has been a major use for eBay and similar as well.

I’m actually surprised no-one has set up an online pawnshop, Klarna meets eBay.

Shipping costs make this probably a bad idea.

You would have to do it as a social marketplace. You could post the items you want to pawn and local independent 'shops' could offer the item. Essentially, a reverse Craigslist with pawn dynamics backed by eBay style profiles and feedback.

That sounds like a good idea tbh.

It would be way too easy to scam them. Pawnshops need to validate the quality of the item and determine if it’s legit. Most Pawnshops will also sell on ebay.

This is exactly what people said about eBay, no?

How can I put this. The clientele who are using eBay is not quite the same as Pawnshops. I’ve seen someone get off a city bus with a massive TV heading into the pawnshop. I doubt the person owned the TV and the pawnshop was known as a fence. It had a walk up after hours window that was open late. Although it’s much more common for homeless people to have phones these days than when I saw this occur. Junkies will find junk that’s for sure.

I thought pawn shops were places you could sell random stuff and buy random stuff, never knew they loaned money!

When you "pawn" an item, you get a short term loan with your item as collateral. If you don't pay back the loan they sell your item.

With interest, of course.

It's the oldest form of credit, the collateralized loan.

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