So one of the things that people will often consider taking to a pawn shop is exercise equipment.
The question that we have before us is if pawn shops will accept, buy, or loan on exercise equipment and how much they will pay for it.
You know one of the first things about answering these types of questions just the fact that pawn shops are aren’t like Walmart, or Home Depot, or other big box stores that you might be commonly familiar with.
When it comes to the Pawn industry, pawn shops are often owned by smaller individual business owners that have their own rules, ideas for things that they would like to accept, or standards under which they accept the items that they take in, no matter whether they are just making a loan against them or buying them outright.
Trust me when I tell you that life would be so much easier if there was just one clear-cut answer I could give to all of these questions but the truth of the matter is it would be impossible for me to tell you exactly how every pawnbroker across the United States operates.
Now with that little disclaimer out of the way let’s talk about the reality about how pawn shops feel when it comes to taking in exercise equipment.
The bottom line for most pawn shops will be whether or not they can effectively turn around and resell the items that people bring in for them to buy.
If the pawn shops in your area have the kind of clientele that is required for them to easily sell exercise equipment, then there is a very good chance that they will consider taking it in either as a loan or just offer to buy it outright from you.
If you’re not sure where to begin when it comes to pawning your exercise equipment let’s take a few minutes and go through some of the steps that you should take.
This may come as a bit of a surprise but yes, there are plenty of pawn shops out there that will accept exercise equipment for loan or as a sale.
Tips for pawning exercise equipment
Okay so let’s talk about what we should do if you want to get a loan against your equipment or get the most money possible out of it.
The first thing you need to do is look for a pawn shop in your area that will accept exercise equipment. The good news is that this is actually fairly easy to do.
You’re going to want to go over to google.com and search the phrase “local pawn shops.”
What Google is going to do is give you a list of pawn shops in your area along with their addresses and phone numbers. You will want to go down this list, one by one, calling each of the local pawn shops in your area to see if they take an exercise equipment and if they don’t, if they might happen to know of another pawn shop that would.
Depending on the number of pawn shops in your area you will most likely be able to find at least two or three different pawnbrokers were willing to make a loan against your equipment, or just buy it from you should you want to sell it.
Once you’ve done this the next thing is to get your exercise equipment in good enough condition to be able to get the most money possible for it.
This obviously involves taking the very basic step of trying to wipe the equipment down and remove any large debris, dirt, or stains that may have developed over years of use.
You don’t really have to go crazy with this, just make it look the best that you can with a reasonable amount of effort. Going through this step will help you present your equipment in the best light possible when the pawnbroker looks at it to decide how easily he might be able to resell the item should he have to, and how much he thinks he would be able to get for it.
Once the equipment is clean the next major thing that you should do is try to locate all of the various pieces that may be necessary for its use. A common example of this would be the collars that go on the end of a barbell. A lot of people forget that these very small details that can make all the difference in the mind of a pawn shop.
The last thing you want to do is to take whatever it is that you have in to the pawn shop incomplete, or missing various pieces that might be critical in the pawn brokers mind.
How much can you expect to get for used exercise equipment
That’s very difficult question to answer to be honest with you because of the variety of exercise equipment out there.
If it’s a highly commercial item that you can often find on a site like amazon.com or ebay.com then you will probably want to follow the standard 40 to 60 percent rule that applies to most things that are pawned in pawn shops.
The 40-60 Rule
That is to say that a pawnbroker will offer you approximately 40 to 60 percent of whatever a similar item and like condition has sold for on eBay for instance.
To make that a little easier to understand, if an item that you bring in has sold on eBay for $100 then you can probably expect to be offered somewhere in between 40 and 60 dollars for your item.
If that doesn’t necessarily seem all that fair to you, you have to realize what a pawn shop has to do in order to resell that item successfully on eBay for a profit. They themselves are going to have to research it, clean it and make it presentable for sale, and then answer any questions involved during the auction.
On top of that they are then going to have to box I am, which boxing and packing material is not free by the way, and this of course also involves paying somebody to box items all day long.
Last but not least both eBay and PayPal take off a percentage of the sales price of an item when it sells their site.
When it comes right down to it, a lot of the 40 to 60 percent profit margin gets eaten up by other various expenses that are associated with this process of buying and selling and then later shipping items.
Now on the other hand if the equipment that you are bringing it in it’s not often sold on a site like eBay or Amazon then what will make the difference in determining how much a pawnbroker offers you for it is purely going to be based on what he thinks he might be able to resell it for in his store.
If exercise equipment isn’t something that sells very well at that particular pawn shop then you will likely be offered very much for it. The reason is is that if the pawn shop does not have the customer base for that type of merchandise then they will have to ask a lower price for it and probably hang on to it for a longer period of time before they are able to find somebody to buy it.
Mandy Dormain started working for Pawn Nerd in 2020. Mandy grew up in a small town in northern Tennessee. But moved to New York for university. Before joining Pawn Nerd, Mandy briefly worked as a freelance journalist for several radio stations. She covers politics and economy stories.
