One day in 2002—or thereabouts—a hungover man struggled through the door at 713 S. Las Vegas Blvd. In his arms was a large and heavy plaster sphinx that he needed to get rid of, fast.
He’d come to the right place: the Gold & Silver Pawn Shop. A locally renowned business since 1988, it’s also the inspiration and filming locale for the History Channel’s long-running series Pawn Stars. The show features owner Rick Harrison and his staff bantering and bartering over the mix of treasures (and occasional trash) that people bring in with hopes of selling.
Despite the thousands of items he’s bought, though, Harrison still has perfect recall of the sphinx story.
“The guy was at a casino and was intoxicated, won a bunch of money and bought this plaster of Paris sphinx head for like $3,000 or something,” Harrison told Adweek. “He tried to bring it home and his wife said, ‘That’s not going in the house.’ So he came to the pawn shop.”
Harrison offered the man $100—which he accepted—and then maneuvered the “ginormous” sphinx to a spot on the sales floor next to the cash registers.
“And it’s been sitting here 20 years,” Harrison lamented.
Even though there hasn’t been a single buyer in the 7 million or so people who visit Gold & Silver Pawn yearly, this week Harrison will improve the odds that he’ll find one. On May 27, Harrison’s business will shift its online presence to Shopify, the Canadian-owned ecommerce platform that counts some 1.75 million vendors in its stable and is the No. 2 online sales portal in America, behind Amazon.
The ‘weird’ factor
Why would an entrepreneur whose pawn shop is arguably the most famous in the United States—and who already had his own website—want to sign up with a subscription-based ecommerce platform?
Simply put, it was easier and cheaper for Harrison to use Shopify’s technology than invest in upgrading his own. As things stood, shoppers could buy some items off Gold & Silver Pawn’s homepage but have to visit other platforms (eBay and Q-Art among them) to buy others.
Consolidating his transactions on Shopify, Harrison said, “is a lot less expensive. Everything’s a lot more streamlined. It makes shipping a lot easier. Communicating with the customer is a lot easier. I talked to all my people in the web department and they’re explaining to me that they could get twice as much done every day if they had a streamlined, better website.”
A better website is important for Gold & Silver Pawn, owing to what Harrison calls the “weird thing about my shop: I have thousands of SKUs, and not one of them is the same thing.”
Unlike a specialty store that sells coffee beans or chocolates or shoes—where the single-category focus does not place high demands on its website—Gold & Silver Pawn’s inventory is literally anything and everything: Pokemon cards, Rolex watches, samurai swords and (of course) Elvis paintings. Much of what Harrison sells is literally one of a kind, such as a page from the script of Scarface ($499) or a Leica camera used by a Luftwaffe pilot during WWII ($12,500).
Harrison is especially keen to free himself of the hassles of using online auction sites, which create an invoicing nightmare for his staff. Plus, owing to high service fees, these virtual auctioneers forced Gold & Silver Pawn to stage auctions with over 150 items just to be cost effective. (“There’s a particular website out there—it starts with an ‘e’—that charges a fortune,” Harrison groused.) Shopify will enable him to put up a multi-lot auction. Or, in the case of especially prominent items—say, for instance, Andy Warhol’s 1966 Souper Dress—auction one of them at a time.
A coveted spot on the floor
The pawnbroker is also hoping Shopify’s turnkey templates will allow him to more easily list inventory that, at present, is invisible to the customers who troop into his store.
While Gold & Silver Pawn occupies a large, freestanding building, the sales floor is a narrow slice of that space. Much of the building houses inventory that the public doesn’t get to see. And visitors can’t buy what they don’t see.
“I have a 6,000-square-foot store and I got a 5,000-square-foot warehouse,” Harrison said. “I could never put all my inventory on the floor.”
Now, he plans to put more of it online and hope that the right collectors will come along. In the market for Kareem Abdul-Jabbar’s old basketball goggles, or perhaps a lift thruster from the Apollo lunar lander? How about some wreckage from the Hindenburg? Harrison’s got it.
Sold: One celebrity client
While streamlining his web sales is an obvious advantage for the pawn shop, Shopify is enjoying a bit of added sparkle in signing up a high-profile client like Harrison.
In 2019—10 years into Pawn Stars’ run—an average of 1.9 million people still tuned in to watch. In fact, so many fans flock to the Las Vegas shop that Harrison and the show’s other personalities can’t even work the counter anymore. Harrison’s celebrity presents another unique wrinkle that no other pawnbroker has ever had to consider: Nevada’s privacy laws protect people who are pawning items, and the gaggle of fans snapping pictures of Harrison would violate those laws.
“Having Rick use the Shopify technology certainly is a plus for the company, based on his profile,” observed retail analyst Bruce Winder, author of the book Retail Before, During & After Covid-19. “Having said that, several large brands currently use Shopify to host their ecommerce operations.”
Which is true. Not only do upmarket brands like Peacock Alley bedding and Magnolia employ the platform, so do household-name giants such as Heinz (in the U.K.) and Staples (in Canada).
From Shopify’s perspective, however, the real gain isn’t so much in Harrison’s stardom. Rather, it’s how the shopkeeper—famous, but still a regular guy—can demonstrate the platform’s ease of use.
“One thing reigns true for anyone looking to sell online: You shouldn’t have to be a tech whiz. Partnering with Rick and the Gold & Silver Pawn Shop team demonstrates this clearly,” said Kyle Riggle, business planning director for Shopify’s creator program.
“While the Pawn Stars come with worldwide name recognition, at the end of the day they are still a family operation, and Shopify can have a real impact on their commerce experience,” Riggle added.
Will ecommerce keep its mojo?
Harrison’s decision to upgrade his ecommerce platform stems from the spike in business he saw in the last two years—and on his wager that it will continue.
“My online business exploded a couple months into the pandemic,” Harrison said. Government stimulus checks in hand, he added, “everyone was sitting at home in front of computers, buying stuff.”
Prior to 2020, Gold & Silver Pawn sold only 5% of its merchandise through its website. That number has since grown to 15%, and Harrison thinks that percentage will get higher.
But that, like the pawn business itself, is speculative.
As Americans have ended their seclusion and ventured back into physical stores, ecommerce has lost some luster. Amazon’s online sales slipped 3% in the first quarter of this year. As for Shopify, one year after enjoying the highest revenue growth in its history and notching a net income of $1.3 billion, it posted a net loss of $1.5 billion for Q1 2022 (though much of that loss stemmed from its equity investments in other technology companies whose valuations have slid).
“We are seeing a softening of ecommerce across many companies as brick-and-mortar retail as a channel picks up some business as consumers get out and shop in person again,” Winder confirmed.
However, he added, “this does not mean that ecommerce is dead or will give back all the gains it enjoyed during the pandemic. It does mean that for a little while, brick and mortar will enjoy a honeymoon with consumers who were sick of being stuck indoors during the pandemic. [But] I expect that sometime in 2023 you will see ecommerce begin to grow again at rates like those we saw pre-pandemic.”
Time will tell. Meanwhile, anyone who’s got a little extra cash burning a hole in his pocket can head over to Gold & Silver Pawn’s new platform. Harrison’s not sure if he’ll ever find a buyer for the ginormous plaster sphinx, but 34 years in the pawn business has taught him that, when it comes to shopping, beauty truly is in the eye of the beholder.
“Hideous jewelry will come in and my employees say, ‘That’s the ugliest thing I’ve ever seen.’ But I [tell them], ‘At one point, someone walked into a jewelry store and thought that was the prettiest thing in the entire store.’”
