The only regret I have is that my dad died about a week before the first show aired. He knew it was happening, and he was proud of me, but he died in Georgia before he could see me on television. He suffered from pancreatitis and ultimately died of pancreatic cancer.
My dad was sober for the last twenty-five years of his life, but it was still the drinking that killed him. All the medical problems he had were because of the long years of drinking before he stopped. It didn’t seem fair to me that he devoted so much effort to his own sobriety—and that of others—and the drinking still got him in the end. It hung with him like a cloud.
I carry my dad’s memory with me. I might not have had the most conventional childhood, but he did the best he could and taught me a lot of good lessons. He always told me, “If you don’t have the money to buy it, you don’t need it.” He never used a credit card or bought anything unless he had the cash. We didn’t have much, but he put away a few dollars at a time and eventually bought a big-screen TV.
When he sold his house in Vegas and moved to the hills of Georgia, I kept tabs on my brother from a distance. Then after the show hit it big and I got some extra money, I brought him out for the summer. I send him school clothes and school supplies whenever he needs them.
Everybody knows I’m crazy for sneakers. I can tell you the history of every Nike shoe and the designers who designed them. I’m smart about weird stuff. Rick calls me an “idiot savant” when it comes to shoes, but he likes them, too. My little brother has got to be the only middle-schooler in the hills of Georgia who has first-edition Nike custom shoes and a Gucci backpack.
* * * *
I have no problem with my character on the show. They can call me a village idiot or an idiot savant or any other kind of idiot they can think of. Hell, I sell three thousand T-shirts a month. I can put up with a lot of words for that.
We have a friendly competition in the shop when it comes to the swag sales. I usually win. I started out thinking I could handle all my own T-shirt sales, and I developed my own shirt—it’s white with a depiction of me in a Roman helmet, like a centurion—and sold it through my website.
I had it delivered to the store and I had to handle all the orders and all the shipping. I was getting good money, but it was a lot of work. Rick saw it and wanted to buy half the company for $5,000, and I told him no. I wanted to do something on my own, and this seemed like something I could handle. So I did, for about six months, before the hassle got to be too much.
I was spending two hours a day sending out T-shirts, and the more I thought about it, the more I realized it would be a lot easier to let Rick handle it along with all the other stuff he was selling through the shop. They had a system going, and it was way more efficient than mine. I might get twenty cents less per shirt under this deal, but someone else puts it on the shelf and sends it out.
Here’s something nobody would believe about me: I’m a pretty good basketball player. Seriously. If you doubt it, you can always ask Big Hoss.
Because you know what? Big Hoss learned the hard way.
About six years ago we were hanging around my apartment and Corey saw a basketball sitting there. He said, “You’re no good at basketball. What are you doing with this?”
“I’m hella good at basketball,” I said.
He didn’t believe me. He didn’t know I’d been hanging out at the park playing basketball just about every chance I got. He kept acting like he didn’t believe me, so I said, “OK. We’ll go to the park right now and I’ll bet you a thousand dollars I can beat you in a game to twenty-one.”
Before he could respond, I said, “And I’ll give you eighteen points.”
That got his attention. All he needed to do was score three before I scored twenty-one. How easy is that? He picked up the ball and said, “Let’s go.”
It took me about six minutes to beat him. He’ll tell you I scored twenty-one straight, but that’s not true. He quit before I could get to twenty-one. I scored twelve or thirteen in a row and he just walked off.
I got moves. I got crossover moves, I can bust the three. I haven’t played much in a while, but back when I was playing, I was way better than you would expect. Corey couldn’t hang with me, I know that for a fact.
Oh, and about two years after Corey and I got to be best friends, we were talking about why I jumped him that day at the park.
I said, “You were picking on my sister, and I needed to stick up for her.”
He said, “What? I wasn’t picking on your sister. I was picking on your neighbor.”
You mean all that fighting was based on a misunderstanding? Man, I wished I’d known that. It would have saved me a lot of flopping and flailing.
CHAPTER 13
Easy Money
There’s nothing better in this world than an irrational consumer craze. Nobody knows how they start, or how long they’re going to last, but they can be the greatest thing that ever happened to a guy like me. I’m always searching for ways to make money, but an irrational consumer craze comes to me. Give me a good fad—the more ridiculously senseless the better—and I’ll be happy as hell until the next one comes along.
The average American consumer, the one that shops at the mall and wants the best for his kids and watches a lot of television, is influenced by popular opinion. If there’s something out there that goes from being a product to being a fad, he’s there. If his kid wants it, he’ll do anything for it. If there’s a chance he can make a buck off it, he’ll go after it. For me, any irrational craze is money in the bank.
I got my first taste of it when I jumped into the designer-jeans fad of the late 1970s. I was fourteen years old, still living in San Diego, completely uninterested in school and completely interested in making money. The jeans that fueled the craze were Jordache jeans. This company had been making jeans for a while, but it took a huge marketing push to turn their pants from niche product to national fad.
My mom and I were doing a lot of things around this time, trying to make some extra money. She found knockoff Jordache jeans in Los Angeles, and she bought a bunch of them for us to sell at the weekend swap meets. We were doubling our money by selling these jeans to kids who either didn’t know—or didn’t care about—the difference between real and knockoff, or couldn’t afford the real thing so they were happy to have knockoff Jordache jeans. I was making two grand a week off these things.
I didn’t know it then, but I was capitalizing for the first time on the irrationality of consumers and the economy’s ability to create a secondary market that was ripe for profit. It’s like identifying one market and creating another to satisfy it. And my first trip into the underground economy was a profitable one.
After we moved to Las Vegas when I was sixteen, we were always looking out for a quick way to make money. Before, when my mom’s real estate business was active, we did it to make some extra money and to do something we enjoyed doing. Now, with my dad’s small coin store struggling to get a foothold, we were doing it for survival. We went from hustling as a hobby to hustling as a way of life.
And I can tell you one thing without fear of contradiction: Nothing gets Old Man more excited than frenzied people throwing money at him over inexpensive stuff.
Which brings up another great thing about Las Vegas: If it’s going to hit, it’s going to come through here. With the number of people traveling here from other places, and the consumerism of a casino-based economy, Vegas is the perfect place to make a few bucks identifying and exploiting a quick fad.
My first Vegas-style success? Gucci bags. When I was sixteen, Gucci bags were big. Real big. Gucci came into the U.S. market with a bang, and Gucci handbags were the company’s first big item to tap into the irrational nature of the consumer. I was always combing secondhand stores and estate sales, and one day I walked into a store in a nondescript strip mall across from the MGM Grand and found knockoff Gucci bags for $10 apiece.
Remember: At this time, roughly 1981, every girl between the ages of tw
elve and twenty-five would do anything for a Gucci bag. And girls that age weren’t too hung up on whether the bag was a knockoff, because their friends probably didn’t know the difference or didn’t care either way.
And right then, standing in the store across from the MGM, I’m looking at $10 Gucci bags that, if real, would sell for $300. I consulted my mom, asking her to come down to the store with me to assess which ones would sell the best. We got together and bought sixty Gucci bags for $600, went to the swap meet that Saturday, and sold every damned one of them for $30 each. Tripled our money.
For the next four months, Gucci bags ruled our lives. All we did was buy and sell these $10 Gucci bags for $30. Made a ton of money for a sixteen-year-old kid. Then one day we packed all our Gucci bags in the trunk and headed to the swap meet, only to find about four or five Asian people selling Gucci bags for less than we were buying them. And that’s how we discovered the bottom had fallen out of the knockoff Gucci bag market.
Our store gave us an anchor, a place to sell the hard-to-get items that people wanted. But we still went to the swap meets and sold stuff there. It helped us sell a lot of things at once, but it also gave us the opportunity to observe and listen to people as they shopped. We got ideas by listening to what they perceived to be hot items, and we were able to see what other people in our position were selling, and for how much.
It was kind of like people-watching for profit.
Zippo lighters. Bomber jackets. Furbys. Baseball cards. Beanie Babies. Levi’s. Tickle Me Elmos. I got in on all of them.
Furbys were the must-have toy during the holiday season of 1998. They were an electronic animal of indeterminate species. Were they a hamster? An owl? Whatever they were, they spoke Furbish and sold like crazy. It didn’t really matter what they were or what they did—I wanted to get my hands on as many as possible. Before Christmas, I ended up with one hundred of them. I paid a lot for them—more than retail—but I sold them for a lot more. Word spread—“Hey, that pawn shop’s got a bunch of Furbys”—and pretty soon there were soccer moms lined up outside the shop, pushing and shoving their way into the store like offensive linemen trying to clear out a hole.
I got Tickle Me Elmos, which I called “Epileptic Elmos.” I could get away with calling them that, for obvious reasons, and we sold them as fast as they came into the store.
The perfect definition of an irrational craze, to me, is something that people can’t pay enough for one year, and the next you can’t give them away. The cheap-toy items on the list—Furbys, Elmos, Beanie Babies—wouldn’t sell for a nickel today.
Many of the fads that earned us big money were fueled by the Japanese market. In the eighties and nineties, the Japanese market was insane. Once it latched on to something, once it decided something was the coolest thing, the people there would do anything—and pay anything—to get their hands on it. The problem, though, was timing: You had to get in early, because once they decided it wasn’t cool anymore, the market fell out immediately, and with little or no warning. The arc would go straight up, then straight down.
And when they would go insane over something, I would go insane over it, too. For one thing, I went absolutely insane over Zippo lighters. In the late nineties, for reasons still not entirely clear, the Japanese decided they had to have every vintage and non-vintage Zippo lighter ever produced in the United States. I had a guy in Los Angeles tip me off about this craze.
He came into the store and asked me to cast him some little brass Coca-Cola bottles that were flat on one side. They were about the size of a small pendant. I had two full-time jewelers working in the shop at the time, so I told the guy I’d do it for ten bucks apiece. I thought this was a little expensive, and I expected some back-and-forth, but he immediately said, “No problem.”
So then I said, “I’m going to have to assess a hundred-dollar mold charge,” and he said, “No problem.”
I had one guy doing nothing but making these little bottles for a few weeks. We made a ton of them, and when the guy came back he said, “OK, now can you solder them onto these Zippo lighters?”
He came in with boxes of them, and we did the soldering and charged him for that. I didn’t ask any questions, and one day he said, “This is the deal with the Zippo lighters, dude. The Japanese are crazy for them. I’ll buy every single one of them you can find.”
The more I gained this guy’s confidence, the more I learned. He was buying these 1950s Zippo lighters, having us put the Coca-Cola bottles on them, and selling them for $400 or $500 apiece to another guy who knew they were fakes. In the fifties, they made these Zippos with the Coke emblem on them, and they were the most sought-after in the Japanese market. These guys were re-creating them and passing them off as authentic and selling them to the Japanese for God-knows-how-much.
When I found out I was being used as part of this scam, I refused to solder any more brass bottles onto the lighters. But I did make the first guy a deal: I’d find a way to get my hands on as many Zippo lighters as possible, and I’d sell him every single one.
I walked around swap meets handing out flyers that said, “I want your Zippo lighters. Top dollar paid.” I was putting them under windshield wipers at the swap meets and grocery stores. My guy in L.A. would pay me stupid money for them, and I knew he was at least doubling and maybe tripling his money off me. I didn’t give a damn. He was paying me $50 apiece for 1950s-era Zippos, and I was getting a ton of them for very little money. In one year, I made between $50,000 and $60,000 off Zippo lighters alone.
I sold some myself. The most expensive was made in the 1930s. I got $1,300 for it.
And then the market just dropped off a cliff. For no reason at all. It started for no reason and stopped for no reason.
I found out it was over when I called the guy up one day and he said, “Nope. No more Zippos. I need bomber jackets.”
No problem. I made the seamless transition to bomber jackets. If you had a World War II bomber jacket, you could almost name your price. They were being sold at local swap meets and being sent to Japan. The first one I found I got $4,500 for. I got as many of those as I could, and then the fad ended as quickly as it started. That’s the definition of a fad, of course. If they lasted, they wouldn’t be fads. Apparently the market gets saturated, or all the cool people who are at the forefront of the trends look around and see too many people wearing bomber jackets and using Zippo lighters, so they decide it’s not cool anymore and they move on to something else.
There’s no rhyme or reason. There’s no way to predict the product, or how much someone might be willing to pay for it. To me, it’s just another example of how awesome my job is and how much fun it is to attempt to figure people out.
Baseball cards made me a ton of money. Baseball cards were the hottest thing in the fad market from 1992 to 1994. Baseball cards also provide a cautionary tale.
The bible of the baseball card world is Beckett Monthly. It’s like the Kelley Blue Book for baseball cards, and it gives prices for cards in every condition from just about every year. When baseball cards were hot, copies of Beckett’s were lying around a lot of coffee tables.
Baseball cards were easy money for people coming into the shop looking for some quick cash. If they didn’t want to bother with selling to a card shop—remember, this was before Internet commerce was a big factor—they would come into our shop and get 50 percent of Beckett.
It was a good deal for them—no hassle, ready cash—and a great deal for me. I would put those cards into the case and almost immediately get more than Beckett. The baseball card boom was like every other bubble in the history of economics; it typified the “irrational exuberance” Alan Greenspan attributed to the dot-com stock craze. Nobody thought baseball cards were going to go down in value, so they were willing to pay whatever it took. After all, nobody was making any more Cal Ripken Jr. rookie cards, so how could they go down in value?
I made a lot of money off baseball cards for the better part of three years. Then, in
1994, it just died. It went down in a big hurry. One reason was baseball itself; the strike/lockout hit in the middle of the 1994 season and scrapped the World Series that year. Everyone with an interest in baseball was so disgusted by that whole mess that nobody wanted to even look at anything related to baseball.
But the baseball card craze can teach a bigger lesson: Never collect anything that says “collectible” on it. It seems counterintuitive, but the things that end up being worth money are things nobody ever thought would be worth anything. Nobody ever thought comic books would be worth anything, and that’s why you have rare comic books. Nobody ever thought pieces of cardboard with photos of baseball players would be worth anything. That’s why kids put them in their bicycle spokes and moms threw them away when their sons went to college.
And that’s why, for a brief period of time, they ended up being worth a lot of money. But it didn’t last.
The first thing that happens when a product becomes officially “collectible” is that people leave them in the packages. They want them to be clean and pristine—they’ve been preached the gospel of “mint condition” forever—so they don’t go down in value. Parents stop allowing their kids to put them in their spokes, and moms start thinking those packs of pristine cards will pay for college.
These “collectibles” end up everywhere. Everyone who ever watched a baseball game owned an unopened complete set of 1999 baseball cards, and they discovered they were no longer an investment. You couldn’t get anything for them.
And that’s how baseball cards went from being an irrational craze to being pieces of cardboard with photos of baseball players. They shot right up, they shot back down.
Collecting is nothing new. When Napoleon raided Egypt in 1798, the treasures confiscated by his army were wildly collectible. People were paying outrageous sums for anything from Egypt. The origins of collecting were a little different back then, though. If a family in the late 1700s had an item that had been signed by George Washington—or even touched by him—family members would pass it down through generations as a sentimental heirloom. It was collecting, but it wasn’t necessarily for profit.
License to Pawn: Deals, Steals, and My Life at the Gold & Silver Page 19
