Slice: Art of the deal thrives here

Picasso painted. Einstein thought. Steve Kohler haggles.

Steve flaunts this buy-and-sell brilliance inside Mid-City Jewelry & Loan Co. on a recent weekday, when a man wheels his four tires into the pawnshop that Steve co-manages.

These are no regular tires. They are thick, nearly new, with 24-inch rims that glisten in the winter sunlight.

The man wants a $900 loan, a figure he thinks perfectly reasonable since he's putting up as collateral tires worth at least twice that.

Steve looks the tires up and down. He looks at the man.

“I don't know,” he says.

He looks down at the tires again. He glances up at the man.

Down at tires a third time.

Up to man, whose face is hot, whose eyes are wide, whose mouth is open, silently pleading, come on, dude, gimme a break...

“I'll give you $700,” Steve declares.

“Sure, sure, sure!” the man agrees, grabbing the offer as if it is about to fly away.

Steve moves immediately to the next customer, not even pausing to reflect on the negotiation he's just won.

If the man comes back to pick up his tires in four months, he will owe Mid-City $980 — that's repayment of the loan plus $70 in interest every month.

If the man never comes back for his tires — this happens at least a quarter of the time — then Steve will slap a price tag on them and offer them for sale in Mid-City's gigantic store.

That price tag will say at least $1,500. Maybe $2,000.

And here's the kicker — with his newly borrowed cash, the man immediately wanders over to the video game area at Mid-City. He looks at the $179 price tag on a Playstation 3.

“Can you do any less?” he asks.

“Nope,” Steve says.

This is the way things go at Mid-City, a gigantic, three-story downtown pawnshop stocked with enough stuff to make Santa Claus jealous — and where they make deals that would turn Scrooge green with envy.

Now, this does not mean the owners and employees of Mid-City are Scrooges themselves. Far from it.

Owner Don Hoberman, his daughter Diane Kohler and her husband, Steve, spend most of the day laughing with customers.

They talk to old customers who call on the phone just to say hello. They show customers pictures of the Kohlers' children. They generally do everything you'd expect to see at, say, a small town insurance agency.

“We're just a typical family business,” Diane says.

Well ... most typical family businesses do not sell a used Sharp 52-inch flat-screen television ($1,299), used Bissell vacuums ($69) and a used Movado watch ($499) alongside thousands of discarded engagement and wedding rings.

Nor do they hawk a used Odyssey putter ($19) or used bongo drums ($50), not to mention a used .44-caliber Magnum ($499) and hundreds of other guns.

Head up a rickety elevator to the pawnshop's second and third floors and you'll find wheelchairs, chain saws, jukeboxes, model airplanes and a meat slicer for sale.

Head out to the Mid-City warehouses to see the heavy equipment: a 2008 Dodge Charger, two Volkswagens, several sport utility vehicles, several speedboats and one dump truck. Mid-City sells about 30 cars a year.

Mid-City started to accumulate this second-hand treasure all the way back in 1955, when Margaret and Irving Hoberman started a 400-square-foot pawnshop in the front room of their plumbing business.

Fifty-four years later, Mid-City Jewelry & Loan covers three floors, spills into two warehouses and covers some 60,000 square feet, nearly all of it crammed with stuff.

At the heart of this second-hand empire is the art of the deal.

In the morning, a man pulls in with a truck. He says he wants $2,500. Steve counters: $1,000. The man leaves, but after he pulls away, Steve predicts he'll be back. “He'll probably take the money,” he says.

A man brings in a digital camera that's never been used. Diane doesn't know what to price it for, so she sends an employee to look up the camera on Best Buy's Web site.

After a consultation, she buys the camera for $150 and sends the man to the front desk so he can be fingerprinted — pawnshops, contrary to popular opinion, are regulated. Each item bought is held for two weeks while its serial number is checked against state and national crime databases to ensure that it hasn't been reported stolen.

After the man leaves, Diane is asked for what price she would place on the digital camera.

“$300,” she answers.

Diane sits down behind the counter and says this pawnshop is a much fairer trading partner than a bank or a credit card company. For one, she says, a seller knows exactly what he is getting: If you pawn something, you can have a 10 percent loan that runs for four months, nothing more, nothing less.

Compare that to confusing credit card fees, she says.

And pawnshops are often the last resort for people who have maxed out credit cards, who are too proud to borrow from family, who need $20 or $50 to make it until payday.

“We don't make people feel small here, we don't make them feel like degenerates,” she says. “This is the real world!”

The real world, indeed — a man soon walks in, puts his head in his hands and explains to an employee that his water heater has busted and he needs money quick.

He pawns a silver ring, extends another loan he already has with Mid-City and prepares to leave ... before stopping at a jewelry case, where he briefly considers buying his wife a ring instead.

A construction manager walks in with some records he found in an abandoned house. A bank has hired him to clear out foreclosed homes, he explains, and he's free to take whatever has been left behind.

He gets $10 for a Michael Jackson record and several others and proceeds to buy a $200 digital camera for Christmas before leaving.

By late afternoon, the store is packed, and the pawnshop wheeling and dealing moves at a furious pace.

A man slips in, nearly unnoticed, to claim a set of bagpipes he pawned several months ago.

When he leaves, Steve confides that he was glad to see the man — not even he knew how to properly price a set of used bagpipes.

The deal has turned out just fine for Mid-City — in the four months the bagpipes have sat in the pawnshop's back room, they have collected $40 in interest.

Mid-City wins again.

“Everybody thinks they are a hustler,” Diane says. “No. We're the best. We're the hustlers.”

Contact the writer:

444-1064, matthew.hansen@owh.com

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