“I let you haf fifteen tollars for de month,” says the pawnbroker, seizing a ticket and commencing to make it out. “You pay me one tollar for de loan, and pay me fifty cents to put de vatch in de safe, you know it might get stole if I leaf it out hier. Dat shuit you, mine young frient?”
The young man has “been there” before, and knows that remonstrance is useless. He nods a silent affirmation, and the pawnbroker makes out a ticket for fifteen dollars, and hands him thirteen dollars and fifty cents, having deducted the interest and the charge for storage. The young man receives the money and ticket, and goes out in silence.
“Dat ish peesness,” says Abraham, admiringly, as the proprietor puts the watch away.
“Yesh,” mutters the pawnbroker, with a satisfied air, “de vatch ish vort a hundred tollar. If he don’t take it up, it will bring us dat.”
The next customer is a poor woman, who comes to pledge some article of household use. She is ground down to the lowest cent, and charged the highest interest; and so the proceedings go on until we become heartsick, and leave the place as invisibly as we can.
The principal dealings of the pawnbrokers are, as we have said, with the poor. Life is hard in Chicago, and those who dwell under the shadow are obliged to make great sacrifices of comfort to keep body and soul together. Everything that will bring money finds its way to the pawn shop and the miserable pittance received for it goes to provide food. Too often articles of household use or clothing are pawned to raise money for drink, and the possessions of the family are one by one sacrificed for this wretched purpose, until nothing is left.
The pawnbrokers find a very profitable class of customers in the respectable working people of the city; many of these regularly pawn articles, sometimes of value, at the first of the week, and redeem them when they receive their wages on Saturday. It is to the broker’s interest to be obliging to these people, since they are regular customers, and he reaps a rich harvest from them in the exhorbitant interest they pay him.
It is a common belief that the pawnbrokers are also receivers of stolen goods. Some of the more unscrupulous may make ventures of this kind, but as a rule the brokers have nothing to do with thieves; the risk of detection is too great, so they confine themselves to what they term their “legitimate business,” and leave dealings in stolen property to the “fences,” who constitute a distinct class.