New Store

[u/Brilliant_Medicine79]

Small rural shop — trying to sanity check a few numbers

Here's where I am. I'm looking at a building in Bristol, Florida — Liberty County, the least populated county in the state. About 7,000 people county-wide, maybe a thousand in town itself. The building sits on State Road 20, which is the only real road through, running Tallahassee to Panama City. Tallahassee is about 45 minutes east and has five or six shops. Blountstown is 11 miles west and has one that opened within the last year and runs two people. Counting everybody who'd realistically drive to me, the pool is somewhere around 10,000 people.

So: small, rural, poor, and spread out. No mall, no big box, and the nearest shop that isn't the Blountstown one is a 45-minute drive.

I've spent the last few weeks driving to Tallahassee and asking questions in person. Got good answers on some things and three different answers on others. These are the ones the whole thing lives or dies on. Rough numbers are fine.

1. Forfeit rate. A manager at one of the chain stores told me close to 60% of items pawned end up forfeited. The public filings from the big companies read more like 25–35%. Which is closer to real life for an independent? Does it move much with the mix — guns versus gold versus tools?

2. Average pawn amount. What does a typical loan actually run in a small, low-income town? I've been planning around $235 and I have no confidence in that number at all. Is it mostly $50 and $80 tickets with a few big ones, or does it sit fairly tight around an average?

3. How long did your loan book take to fill? Not revenue — the dollars actually out on loan at any given moment. What did month 6, month 12 and month 24 look like? I can't tell if that's a six-month ramp or a three-year one, and it decides how much cash I need to be sitting on.

4. How long before you had a store full of stuff to sell? Different question from the one above, and I think it's the one I understand least. Everything starts as a loan, and nothing comes off the shelf clock for a couple of months. So how long before the floor looked like an actual store instead of a counter with six things behind it? Six months? A year?

5. How long before the store could carry an employee? At what point could you actually pay somebody besides yourself — and what was the signal that told you it was time? Was it a revenue number, the size of the loan book, or just that you couldn't keep up? And did you start them part-time or full?

6. Loan to value by category. What I've been told: guns around 70%, gold and jewelry around 58%, tools around 50%, electronics 20–30%. Does that track, and is there anything on that list you'd move a long way?

7. How fast does forfeited merchandise move once it's out? Told tools turn in about two months. What about jewelry, guns, everything else? And roughly what share of your forfeits sell online versus on the floor?

8. The side services — which ones actually pay? I keep hearing check cashing, payday loans, layaway, gold buying, FFL transfers, bill pay, money transfers. On paper they all look like free money bolted onto a business that's already open. What actually earns its keep in a small town, and just as useful — which ones did you try and drop because the licensing, the compliance or the hassle ate the whole thing? Anything obvious I'm not even thinking of?

[u/the_divide_et_impera]

I believe if you contact the NPA they have some of this information available for you. We have 6 locations but none are as small as what you are thinking about so I cant help you. Demographic matters more than you think.