Proposed changes to Oak Park’s pawnshop ordinance would be devastating to resale shops, owners of those businesses said.
At a March 26 meeting, the village board directed staff to draft possible changes to laws governing pawnshops, including requiring the use of software to catalogue items bought and sold there, imposing stricter rules for gathering identification (including taking thumbprints from people pawning merchandise), and requiring shops to digitally videotape transactions. The software costs between $4,000 and $6,000. Staff suggested looking into expanding the law to cover all for-profit resale shops, including those that sell music CDs.
“That’s absolutely outrageous,” said Val Camilletti, owner of Val’s halla Records, 239 Harrison St. “There’s just no way to make that back.”
Alan Heffelfinger, who owns Oak Park Records, 179 S. Oak Park Ave., said a required outlay of thousands of dollars would force him to close his store.
“That’s like a month’s worth of sales for me,” he said.
“My margins are tight as they are,” said Randy Schorle, who owns Tagitsold, which resells goods on the Internet auction site eBay. Schorle said he’d have to move if he had to pay thousands for database software.
Camilletti said she buys CDs for $1 to $5 and resells them for $5 to $8, and that it’s not just about the cost, but time, too.
“The idea of having to log every album is just ludicrous for what is involved in buying that kind of stuff,” she said.
Chicago changed its resale law in 2002, eliciting a lawsuit from the owner of CD resale shops. At the core of the suit was the idea that tracking what CDs people listen to is a violation of free speech and expression. “The City of Chicago has no right to document my customers’ listening habits,” the owner told the Chicago Reader at the time.
In February, similar pawnbroker law changes were proposed in Davenport, Iowa. Resale shops there also fought the measure.
Schorle said the biggest difference between his store and a pawnshop is that goods are consigned at Tagitsold. The person bringing in the merchandise doesn’t get any money from the sale for 30 to 60 days.
Camilletti said CDs differ from more valuable items that are often stolen. “It’s not like a bicycle or a car that has some kind of identifying characteristic on it,” she said.
Village Manager Tom Barwin said registering CDs with police could help identify patterns of people selling stolen merchandise, but that resale shops are not the core impetus for rewriting Oak Park’s laws.
“The priority here is to work through the pawnshop issues,” he said.
Barwin suggested that perhaps some measures less intense than the database software and video monitoring could be considered for resale shops.
Heffelfinger and Camilletti said they would be willing to change their procedures to work with police. Heffelfinger said most of his customers have ID cards ready when selling CDs to him, perhaps because they’re used to Chicago’s law.
“I have no problem asking people for IDs, and most of my customers don’t have a problem with showing it,” he said.
Writing down names, phone numbers and even driver’s license numbers wouldn’t be a big deal, but cataloguing every CD might. Some of his CDs he buys for a dime and sells for a quarter, so a requirement to log every item would mean the end to those bargain bin discs.
Camilletti said “it wouldn’t be unreasonable” to require registration from people who sell past a certain value of merchandise to a resale shop. She suggested $100 as a trigger amount to be compatible with electronics and jewelry items at a pawnshop.
“We want to cooperate with Oak Park,” Schorle said.
But the resellers agree on something else: that few stolen items come into their shops and that the people bringing them in are told to get lost.
“My psychic ability is pretty good,” said Camilletti, who never checks IDs of people bringing in music to sell. She’s been buying used records (and eventually cassettes and CDs) since 1972 and remembers calling the police just once because someone brought in a garbage bag full of music.
When thieves find they can’t sell in their stores, they never come back, the owners said.
“I would never knowingly buy stolen merchandise,” Heffelfinger said. When the music tastes between the seller and the merchandise don’t match, he asks about the music and can tell when people have brought in something that wasn’t theirs. When people hold their faces, cry and lament about paying rent, “You know those are their records.”
Barwin said the village is at the beginning of its process of looking into the pawnshop ordinance and will seek input from the business community before passing changes on to the village board.
CONTACT: dcarter@wjinc.com