Last Updated on November 18, 2025 by Michael

15 Things Pawn Shops Won’t Buy (No Matter How Desperately You Need Gas Money)

Rent’s due. Your bank account looks like a typo. And suddenly that pile of “collectibles” in your garage is looking less like junk and more like your ticket to solvency.

Hold up.

Before you load up the minivan with your life’s poor decisions, let’s talk about what pawn shops absolutely, positively, will NOT take off your hands. Not even if you cry. Especially if you cry.

1. Your Ex’s Love Letters

Picture this: You walk into a pawn shop with a shoebox full of Brad’s feelings. Brad, who once wrote you a sonnet comparing your eyes to “glistening Olive Garden breadsticks.” Brad, who signed every letter “Your eternal flame dragon.”

Now picture the pawn shop owner’s face.

That man has been through three divorces and a tax audit. He doesn’t care that Brad wrote these letters in calligraphy. He doesn’t care that one of them is technically 47 pages long (Brad had a lot of feelings after that wine tasting). What he cares about is you leaving his establishment immediately.

Fun fact: The street value of your ex’s emotional word vomit is exactly zero dollars and zero cents. Less if you factor in the gas you wasted driving there.

2. Half-Used Beauty Products

“It’s La Mer!”

Nobody cares, Jennifer.

You’ve had your fingers in that jar. Your actual human fingers. The same fingers you use to pick your nose when you think nobody’s watching (everyone’s watching, Jennifer). And now you want someone else to pay money to smear your finger juice on their face?

Your Delusion	Reality
“Barely used!”	You’ve been double-dipping since 2019
“$300 retail!”	Current value: One staph infection
“Still has the receipt!”	The receipt has more value than the product

That’s not commerce. That’s biological terrorism with a price tag.

3. Your Collection of Hotel Toiletries

You know what’s sadder than trying to pawn hotel soap? The fact that you’ve been collecting it for seventeen years like it’s your job. Like somewhere there’s a Hotel Soap Museum curator going, “My God, is that a 2007 Holiday Inn Express shampoo? IN THE ORIGINAL BOTTLE?”

There isn’t.

What happens when you bring in your soap hoard:

• The pawn shop owner questions every decision that led him to this moment
• Other customers suddenly feel better about their own lives
• Someone definitely takes your picture for their group chat
• You become a cautionary tale

Those aren’t collectibles. They’re evidence of a problem that therapy can’t fix but should definitely address.

4. Grandma’s “Priceless” Dentures

No.

NO.

NO.

Someone really—REALLY—tried to sell human teeth for money. Used human teeth. Teeth that have chewed. Teeth that have… existed in another person’s mouth-hole for decades.

“But they’re gold!”

So what? You know what else contains gold? Old computer parts. You know what people still don’t want to buy? SOMEONE ELSE’S MOUTH BONES.

The pawn shop owner didn’t go to business school for this. He had dreams once. Plans. And now he’s staring at a ziploc bag full of what can only be described as haunted chompers while you explain their “historical significance.”

Meemaw’s dentures belong in the ground with Meemaw, not in a display case next to someone’s pawned Xbox.

5. Your Kid’s Participation Trophies

Ah yes, the participation trophy industrial complex has convinced you that little Braedyn’s 9th place finish in the district spelling bee is worth something.

It’s not.

It’s worth less than nothing because at least nothing doesn’t take up space in your garage. You’ve got 73 pounds of plastic proof that your children showed up to things. Congratulations? Your kids participated in activities. So did literally every other kid. That’s what kids do. They participate.

• Number of participation trophies manufactured daily: 47,000
• Number that will ever be worth money: 0
• Number your kids care about: Also 0
• Number gathering dust while you cling to the memory of Braedyn spelling “cat” correctly: All of them

6. Outdated Electronics (Looking at You, HD-DVD Players)

That HD-DVD player isn’t “vintage.” It’s a monument to backing the wrong horse in a format war that lasted about as long as your last relationship.

You’ve also got a Zune (remember those?), a BlackBerry that insists it’s still 2009, and a GPS unit that thinks Yugoslavia is a real place you can visit. These aren’t collectibles. They’re e-waste with delusions of grandeur.

The Museum of Bad Tech Decisions includes:

• Your MiniDisc player and all 3 MiniDiscs you ever bought
• That Microsoft Kin (Google it, then weep)
• A LaserDisc player that weighs more than a modern refrigerator
• Whatever the hell a Gizmondo was supposed to be
• The Virtual Boy that gave everyone headaches (Nintendo’s fever dream)

The pawn shop has a dumpster full of this exact garbage from other people who also thought they were sitting on “the next big thing.” Spoiler alert: The next big thing is never the thing you bought at Circuit City in 2004.

7. Used Underwear

The fact that this section exists means we’ve failed as a civilization.

Someone, somewhere, at some point, packed up their used undergarments—their USED UNDERGARMENTS—and thought, “Yes, this is a reasonable thing to exchange for currency.”

It doesn’t matter if they’re designer. It doesn’t matter if they’re “vintage.” It doesn’t matter if you boiled them in holy water blessed by the Pope himself.

They’re used underwear.

USED. UNDERWEAR.

8. Your “Rare” Beanie Babies

Listen, the Great Beanie Baby Bubble of the late ’90s convinced a lot of people they were investment bankers when they were really just adults collecting stuffed animals.

Princess Diana Bear was supposed to pay for your retirement. Now it’s a dog toy. That “rare” manufacturing error where the tag is misspelled? That’s not rare. That’s just quality control having a bad day at the sweatshop.

What You Think	What Everyone Else Knows
“Worth $10,000!”	Worth whatever lint is in your pocket
“Pristine condition!”	Your cat has definitely peed on it
“Investment grade!”	So is lottery tickets, technically

Your Beanie Baby “portfolio” has about as much chance of making you rich as your plan to become a professional food blogger who only reviews gas station sushi.

9. Essential Oils and “Healing” Crystals

Oh, you’ve brought rocks. To a pawn shop. Rocks that you claim have magical powers.

And lavender oil that supposedly cures everything from anxiety to male pattern baldness to the fact that you’re trying to pawn massage oil to pay your electric bill.

That amethyst doesn’t channel cosmic energy. If it did, it would have channeled you away from the MLM scheme that convinced you to buy $400 worth of rocks in the first place. The only thing these crystals are healing is your cousin Madison’s bank account.

10. Expired Food Items (Yes, Someone Tried)

“It’s aged!”

No, Kevin, it’s expired. There’s a difference. Aged things are intentional. Expired things are what happens when you forget you bought string cheese in 2019.

Things people have actually tried to pawn:

• A can of Billy Beer from 1977 (it was leaking)
• “Vintage” Dunkaroos (they weren’t vintage, they were biohazards)
• A McDonald’s burger “from 1987” (it looked the same as a current one, which is concerning)
• Breast milk (?????????)

You’re not preserving history. You’re cultivating botulism.

11. Your DIY “Art”

That thing you made at wine-and-paint night isn’t art. It’s what happens when Groupon and Merlot make bad decisions together.

You painted a tree that looks like broccoli having an existential crisis. You wrote “Blessed” in cursive on reclaimed wood (it’s not reclaimed, you found it behind Wendy’s). You hot-glued seashells to a mirror and called it “coastal chic.”

The pawn shop owner has seen enough Pinterest failures to fill a museum of good intentions gone wrong. Your “art” belongs in that one drawer everyone has full of things they can’t throw away but don’t know why they’re keeping.

12. Broken Exercise Equipment

The Bowflex.

Jesus Christ, the Bowflex.

It’s been a $1,800 clothes hanger since Obama’s first term. The resistance bands have fossilized. There’s a bird nest in the seat. An actual bird nest. With eggs.

But sure, tell the pawn shop owner it’s “like new” while a family of squirrels literally runs out of it.

What they see:

• Rust (everywhere)
• Missing parts (important ones)
• DNA evidence of your failure
• Dust so thick it has geological layers
• The ghost of who you thought you’d become

You haven’t exercised since Blockbuster existed but somehow think someone else wants to pay money for your monument to broken promises.

13. Your Wedding Dress

That dress has seen things. Absorbed things. It’s less “vintage gown” and more “evidence.”

The champagne stains. The grass stains. The… other stains. The ones from when you found Derek with your sister at the reception. The dress is basically a wearable crime scene.

What your dress is actually worth:

• Purchase price: $8,000
• Current value: Negative dollars
• Emotional damage: Immeasurable
• Chance anyone wants it: Same as Derek coming back

You can’t pawn heartbreak, Sharon. You can’t even donate it. Goodwill has standards.

14. “Autographed” Items from Your Uncle Who “Totally Met That Celebrity”

Uncle Randy’s totally legitimate celebrity encounters that definitely happened:

That baseball signed by Babe Ruth? Babe Ruth didn’t use glitter pens. That photo with Elvis? Elvis died before Photoshop existed but somehow his head is slightly too big for his body. That napkin signed by Jesus? Come on.

Randy also claims he has:

• A guitar pick from Beethoven (Beethoven was deaf and died in 1827)
• Shakespeare’s backup quill (it’s a Bic pen)
• Authenticated Bigfoot hair (it’s Randy’s back hair)

The certificate of authenticity Randy printed at Kinko’s isn’t fooling anyone, especially not the pawn shop guy who’s seen Randy try this seventeen times with seventeen different “authenticated” Moon rocks.

15. Used Mattresses

This is the nuclear option of bad decisions.

You’re trying to sell the sponge you’ve been sweating into for a decade. The rectangle of horrors that’s absorbed every flu, every nightmare, every questionable decision you’ve made after midnight.

That mattress has its own ecosystem. Its own weather patterns. Scientists could discover new forms of life in those stains.

What lives in your mattress:

1. Your dead skin (pounds of it)
2. Dust mites (billions)
3. That thing from 2017 (unspeakable)
4. Memories (mostly bad)
5. Probably a portal to hell (unconfirmed)

It’s illegal to sell used mattresses in most states because civilization depends on some boundaries never being crossed. This is one of them.

The Bottom Line

Here’s the deal: If you wouldn’t buy it from a sketchy guy in an alley behind a Denny’s at 3 AM, the pawn shop doesn’t want it.

They’re not running a museum of bad decisions. They’re not therapists for your financial crisis. They’re definitely not interested in becoming patient zero for whatever’s growing on your “collectibles.”

Pawn shops want things other humans might actually buy. With money. On purpose.

Revolutionary concept, right?

So before you load up that Honda Civic with what you think is treasure but is actually just garbage with aspirations, ask yourself: Would any reasonable person exchange currency for this? If the answer requires mental gymnastics, leave it in the garage where it belongs.

Or have a yard sale.

At least there, crushing disappointment comes with complimentary lemonade.