The Bizarre Culture of Pawn Stars

There's a typo in this video's title but if I fix it YouTube literally will stop promoting it. So, yeah, what a BIZZZZARE thing that is. (we have a Justin Y comment so it's too late to repost as well lol) Go to buyraycon.com/quinton for 15% off your order! Brought to you by Raycon. My Twitter ➱ twitter.com/Q_Review My Patreon ➱ www.patreon.com/QReview Guest editor: Chris London, @Adustus twitter.com/ChrisLondonFilm Garfield Zine link: twitter.com/nomondayszine/status/13009077219616112… Full Pawn Hub skit on Quinton Re2s: https://youtu.be/mSm-DC_Mo_4

“I should probably make a stand alone icarly video and then never talk about it again” Oh Quinton . So young

"The Chum Chum Room" might be the least sexiest name for a coke and strippers room

I JUST got that "pawn stars" is wordplay on "porn stars." I'm an idiot.

In a similar vein of shows with depressing natures; the original concept for “Storage Wars” involved tracking down the owners of the abandoned storage units. Inevitably they discovered that the units were abandoned through poverty or death, which made bad tv. So they reformatted in a way that ignores the depressing truth.

"Also all of the characters were on iCarly once." the sound of 1,000 pauses as we all take the time to find that episode of iCarly.

I was on the show in Season 4 and here are my notes... The "family" segments are entirely made up. Everything -- from them being in the store, ever, waiting for stuff to show up, to how many kids Rick has is fake. If you see them speaking dialog and it's not to someone selling something, it's fiction. The customer segments can be broken down into four types. Sellers, Found Sellers, Fake Sellers and Celebrity Encounters. Sellers (people like me) approach the production company with an item they would like to sell, and if they like it, they ask Rick if he wants to look at it. If he likes it they schedule you for a filming date/time. Most sellers know they aren't getting full price for their item and (like me) are willing to exchange that for a few moments of TV time. (I suspect some go on the show thinking they will get over on Rick and make more than they could elsewhere.) Found Sellers are usually people in the Las Vegas area who have listed something interesting on eBay, Craigslist, etc... and were contacted by the producers before TPS shows up. They almost never want to sell for TPS prices, but on rare occasions Rick will pay their asking price. Fake Sellers are people that have no interest in selling to TPS but have cool stuff that the producers want to showcase. Of note would be Jesse Amoroso and members of his staff at Cowtown guitars and the number of cars that showed up when they were filming Counting Cars. Celebrity Encounters are obvious and mentioned in this video. It started with Bob Dylan and slowly got more and more blatant and bad over every season. This video gets the "Seller" segment filming a bit wrong. On any given day the store is filled with tourists buying Pawn Stars logo merch. Shirts, coins, DVDs and autographed pictures, which, btw, I saw signed by interns on the back dock. When filming is about to start they empty the store, except for the seller and their guests. Those guests become the background customers - and if the seller has no guests, they will pull a few from the tourists lined up outside. That's when TPS walk into the shop and get set up for filming. Background people are not allowed to talk. The seller is asked to go outside and walk in with their item - which has been in TPS hands since the seller showed up over an hour earlier. My segment didn't have an "expert" but I'm quite certain that if one was called for, the expert would have been in back with TPS googling or otherwise getting info on the item. No doubt they were told what would be walking in the door before they showed up to film, but they do have hands-on time alone with the item before filming starts as well. My segment did have Chum - who is so smart her had to be fed his "dumb" comments from a producer. The segments where TPS and the customer talk about the item are largely unscripted. For me, Chum was fed "dumb" comments but my interaction with Rick was largely what you for to see in the episode that aired. The producers were also very clear that when it came to the price negotiation I was on my own with Rick. That part is 100% genuine and what aired was 100% what happened. After this they film some B roll footage (closeups, etc...) and I was directed to the cash register to fill out the sales paperwork. After that, they take you outside to film the bit about what you hope to sell it for. You ever see someone get that price exactly right? That's how they do it. I stopped watching around 2015 because they started focusing more and more on the family dialog stuff and they had less and less interesting items. As much as I enjoy Rebecca Romney nerding out over books, it was obvious they were just finding excuses to bring her into an episode because she was more fun to look at than... well, everyone else on the show. Oh and the item I sold... it's still at the shop. After my episode aired, people started looking around their homes and found so many copies of what I sold that the prices on eBay tanked. They can't sell my item without taking a loss over what they paid me. They could have offered me 10% of what they paid me and I'd have said yes just to make sure they used my segment! Oh and no - they do not pay to fly you to Vegas or stay in a hotel. Everyone always asks.

As someone with most of their childhood possessions either sitting in someone else's home or in a dumpster due to my family having to sell pretty much everything we own to a pawn shop just to keep our house, only to lose our house after we had nothing left, this episode resonates with me. Thanks for touching on the predatory nature of pawn shops and how this show disgustingly glorifies one of the worst times of my life that informs every action or opinion I've taken or made since.

According to Pat the NES Punk... the show literally just brought him in to show off those cartridges - as some sort of a historical, educational “show and tell” to the audience. He had absolutely zero intention of selling them. Same thing applied to that one guy trying to “sell” his ultra rare, $50,000 sealed copy of Super Mario Bros.

"Hey sorry I can't pay you more, I have a business to run" Says the star of a wildly popular reality show

The History Channel's fall from grace is like meeting someone you used to love 30 years down the line, only for them to be completely unhinged.

My mom used to think chumlee's name was "chun li" and i couldn't get the image of chum in chun li's outfit out of my head

I didn’t know what the recession was at the time, but my family would watch pawn stars fairly often. A few years later my mom took us to a pawn shop trying to sell our great grandmother’s silverware, only to find out they weren’t silver. We were in a tough spot, and my mom started crying after hearing that. I didn’t watch pawn stars after that, it really is sad to think about the people going in there to sell stuff.

"I should probably just make a standalone iCarly video and never talk about it again." please quinton, please

Customer: this is Abe Lincoln’s hat, the one he wore when he was killed. He was my great great grandpa. Please, I need to pay off my medical bills. Can I get $75 Pawn Guys: seems legit. hmmmm best I can do is $12.99. Customer: can you do $14? Pawn guys: HMMMMMMM

"I should probsbly just make a standalone video about iCarly and then never talk about it again" Quinton's videos honestly age like wine in the best way

This video made me remember all those storage-unit auction shows that were really popular around the same time. Those kinda shows also tried to be funny while totally ignoring the really sad parts (like the people who lost all their things) while focusing on overblown personalities of the buyers, fake drama for the show, and “oh look, cool stuff!”

I can’t take the term “chum chum room” seriously. The name just makes me think of the nickelodeon character.

my relationship to this show is that one time my grandpa referred to it as “porn stars” and that memory is seared into my brain.

This show was called "The price of history" in Latin America to make it seem like it was actually educational.