Pawn Shop

Yesterday during lunch I went to my usual dealer in Silver, the owner of a local coin store, only to find that he is closed on Tuesdays. So, wanting to make my usual monthly investment in silver, I decided to see who else offers silver coins.

The search brought me to a pawn shop in a pretty bad neighborhood. If you've never visited a pawn shop before, it is a pretty depressing experience. It is, in a sense, the opposite of doing survival prep -- pawn shops are loaded not with useful things, but with things people have decided they can do without. The biggest items I saw in the store were stereo equipment, DVD players, game consoles, and video games themselves. After that, it was cameras, and after that, watches. A woman in front of me had a bag of jewelry which the store owner -- a hyperactive but highly intelligent twentysomething -- was picking through. He was on a cell phone getting spot gold prices for 10k, 14k, and 24k gold, presumably from a bigger dealer upstream.

He looked at me curiously -- I was in my usual high tech serf costume of a polo shirt and khakis. "Do you sell silver coins?" I asked.

He did -- but not my usual Maples and Eagles. He had the older stuff -- Morgan and Peace dollars. After quickly running through my head the value of a Morgan against the price of pure silver (77.34%, if you're curious), I bought five Morgans from him.

One thing that impressed me with the Morgans is that they were coins meant to last -- the edges are heavily milled, and the face and back are stamped deeply. Even after 125 years the words E Pluribus Unum and Liberty are clearly visible. The coins impressed me for being, well, the real deal. The coin itself is the store of value, unlike the "full faith and credit" that backs up the junk coinage of today. On Survivalblog fairly recently, a commenter who lived in the Balkans in the 1990s said that trade there was often carried out in the old coinage of the Austro-Hungarian empire -- governments may change, but a silver coin lasts forever. Even though the Morgans and the Peace dollars no longer circulate, they may yet have service to perform if the U.S. ends up defaulting on its debt and facing inflation -- which it surely must. I'm going to continue to buy Eagles and Maples, but I'll also throw in some Morgans and Peace Dollars as I expect they will also be useful in the future. They are certainly durable old things.

Silver yesterday closed over $17.00 again. I'm anticipating it will go higher.