I must say that I now have a greater appreciation for the pawn shop for which I work. I am currently visiting my family (a few hours away from where I currently live and work) and visited one with some of my siblings. I couldn't help but make observations and comparisons as we roamed about the shop, and I felt a strange melee of competitiveness, superiority, inferiority, pride, like, and disgust. Here are a few of my observations.
The Good
1) This pawn shop had a much larger showroom floor.
2) This pawn shop had four times the amount of movies on display and even had them semi-alphabetized! I spoke with one of the workers and was told that there was one employee whose job was nothing but putting out and organizing their DVDs. On a side note, my older brother--who was with me at the time--has an obsession with buying DVDs and ended up purchasing 20 of them and then planned on returning on Black Friday to buy more when the price dropped from $1.50 to $0.99.
3) I saw a Zelda game I wanted, but the price they normally charge is $4.99 and that seemed high when my pawn shop only sells them for $2.99. I told a gentleman this much and he said they could sell me the game for the lower price. Haggling. It's a beautiful thing.
The Bad
1) Merchandise Displays : They may have had a larger showroom floor, but the way this pawn shop organized things for display did not allow them to utilize the space they had to its fullest capacity. Rather than stacking or setting out things in a neat or orderly fashion, their displays seemed to be formless masses that were as impractical as they were offensive to the eye. The pawn shop I work for packs as much as we can onto the floor--while making it actually look good--because A) we have a wide array of items to buy, and B) if we don't display this large array then people will not see or buy our merchandise because they will not be aware that it is available.
2) Jewelry : My pawn shop has a large display of jewelry which it displays very professionally with various kinds of stands and holders atop of cloth-covered platforms of varying levels. Our jewelry displays look much like what you would see at an actual jewelry store. This other pawn shop, on the other hand, had hardly any jewelry on display and did not even try to present them in an aesthetically pleasing manner. The display cases looked naked and laughable.
3) Electronics : My pawn shop has iPods, MP3 players, video cameras, digital cameras, DVD players, TVs, receivers, stereo equipment, surround sound systems, car audio, video game consoles and video games coming out of our ears, but this other pawn shop had hardly any of those things (except for TVs, which they had a respectably sized display of). I wasn't sure if it was because they didn't have any in stock or if they just didn't have it displayed because they were so inept at displaying their merchandise.
4) Receipts : This pawn shop had the most ridiculous system of printing out receipts. Instead of having a normal receipt print out of the cash register, each individual receipt was printed from a normal printer on an 8.5" by 11" sheet of paper. The print out looked like a normal receipt in the way that it was thin and did not occupy the entire piece of paper, but this method of printing caused the employees to rip off and throw away the other three quarters of the sheet of paper that had not been printed upon for the receipt. What a waste of paper, especially if you take into consideration the dozens of customers they serve on a daily basis. It was horrifying.
The Conclusion
My pawn shop is so much better.
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