I've been looking for an affordable, used, laptop for the purposes of writing. I went to Buck Creek…read morePawn, as I've shopped from them before for Guns and ammo, and saw that they had a single laptop left.
The owner, or at least the person working the counter, must not have much knowledge of computers. That, or he is practicing extremely shady business practices and is overcharging with knowledge.
The laptop was old, at least five years in age, and operated on Windows 7 (A now obsolete operating system. Windows no longer supports updates for the OS.) and I found that the charger was broken. It was meant to be a three pronged inlet, however the middle prong was missing and sent out a spark when plugged into the outlet.
I turned the laptop on to test the machine and found it extremely slow and unresponsive. I brought up "Task Manager" and found that it took nearly three minutes for the diagnostic tool to actually respond. From there, I looked through the various functions and found few programs that should be interfering with the speed of the CPU. This tells me that the hardware, rather than the software, is the cause for the slow response speeds. With a desktop, that type of fix is easy and relatively inexpensive. A laptop is a bit more difficult to fix.
Again, this is fine. They buy used P.C.'s and it did turn on and operate, if slow. However, the owner stated he would not sell the P.C. for less than 125.00 dollars. He stated that he had sold every laptop in the store for the same price and did not seem to understand the difference in hardware, software, and worth.
A similar P.C., Brand new, can be bought at Walmart for 150.00 with a Windows 10 operating system, box, and charger. A used P.C., of similar specs, can be bought for 50 dollars online. The fact that he had bought this P.C. for less then 25.00 dollars shows a desire to make over 200% profit with absolutely no desire to negotiate because he believes that the current pandemic will allow him to sale the P.C. for whatever he says.
This is the literal definition of Price Gauging.
I would also be careful in buying weapons from this pawn shop. I bought a Glock 19 in 2017 from this company and recieved a call from them about a month later asking that I return the weapon. It had been stolen from a retired Georgia State Patrol officer. They did give me another, lower quality, weapon as a trade. I'm not certain they didn't rip me off, even after giving me a bit of cash to make-up for the price, after seeing how they handled the sell of an obsolete computer.
Be wary of buying from them and do your research before you pay. There are other pawnshops in the area, remind them of that, and let the free market do its thing.
