Selling to a pawn shop Question?

-Any tips for selling an electric guitar? Getting top dollar? Is it worth it?Are you trying to sell it or are you trying to Pawn it?



If you're trying to pawn it then there's a good likelihood that you'll try to get it back and so pawning it makes sense. But if you're trying to sell it and be done with it forever then pawn shops make very little sense. The reason being that the pawn shops will NOT give you top dollar for the guitar. They need to make a profit on the guitar and to cover their overhead they're going to want to make at least 50% profit margin.



So if you bought your guitar at say 200 bucks but they think it's only going to sell for $100 now that it's used they'll offer you $50 for it. So that they can sell it for double what they paid for it and make $50.



The reason pawn shops stay in business is there are a lot of people who run into cash flow problems and so they need cash immediately. Pawnshops therefore know that people are desperate for the money so there's no incentive to pay top dollar for something like a guitar (which is compounded by the fact that a lot of pawnshops have tons of guitars already).



If you're looking to one day get the guitar back or you're really super desperate for cash money right now then maybe the pawnshop is a good approach. But if you're just not playing the guitar anymore and you want a little money for it I'd recommend putting up an ad on craigslist for it and getting rid of the middle man. I mean if you assume that your old guitar has a market value of $100 then even getting $75 for it from a craigslist ad is better than the pawnshop would be. So if you're not desperate for the money I'd just start at a value over what you paid for it and place a craigslist ad and just knock the price down everyday until you find someone that will buy the guitar off you. That way even if you don't get the full market value of the guitar you'll still have 100% of the money it sells for, in the pawnshop scenario the pawn shop sells the guitar for $100 (let's say and since they gave you $50) it means they get 50% of the profit that could have been yours.