Scouter on “Pawn Stars”
Posted in Current Events by John E. Pannell on January 29th, 2010 at 2:12 am Last night while falling asleep in front of the TV with my cats, I was watching “Pawn Stars” on The History Channel. The show features a Las Vegas pawn shop and the stuff that’s brought in there to be sold or pawned.
One of the potential customers was an elderly gentleman who visited in complete Scout uniform looking to sell a large accumulation of stamps. He was looking to raise money to send boys to camp. He was hoping there would be something of great value in the pile of unsorted used postage stamps still on paper. He referred several times to a “million dollar stamp”. The horde, from what could be on TV, was very unremarkable and seemed to be heavy in stamps from the Third Reich. Those who buy patch collections could sympathize with the plight of someone trying to buy this: imagine if it was a completely unsorted and unfocused patch collection.
An expert was brought in by the pawn shop owner to look over this accumulation. He found nothing of value and said this collection was essentially worthless. As a former stamp collector, I’d add the time spent soaking these off the paper, then sorting and cataloging these items for sale would not add up to a minimum wage job. Nevermind it would take many years for even the best stamp dealer to sell such a quantity of low end items. For example, imagine being a patch dealer trying to sell a large number of unsorted district event patches or very common CSPs and lodge flaps.
The pawn shop owner could not buy the stamps, but in the end he did make a donation to send kids to camp.
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