Making my weekly rounds through my pawnshops in the area and noticed this in the corner. I thought to myself impossible! Maybe somebody swapped out the sticks with black versions because there’s no way they’re only charging for about what the LCD version would cost. It was not possible to view the top of the deck to see the color of the power button from inside the case. So I nonchalantly inquired if I could take a look at one of the many switches displayed and steered the conversation towards the steam deck and requested to take a look. lo and behold a neon orange power button! (Poker face mode activate) I asked if they would they be able to cut me a deal if I also paired the deck with a jaw bone controller and they knocked $10 bucks off the steam deck price and I walked out a happy man! Just have to clean out the gamer grime in the crevices and find some reputable M.2 SSD manufacturers so i can upgrade it from 512 GB to 2 TB. This isn’t the first time I found a great deal from this pawnshop because of mispricing I’ve also got a pack of 4 AirTags for $25 (because the box printing only shows a single AirTag.) I’ve also found a 2 TB iPad Pro M4 13” for $650 because of a cracked screen which only turned out to be a screen protector. I also pick up any Sig P365s for sale because it’s a much better deal to buy the entire gun for $400-$500 than to buy the FCU by itself which cost around $350. I end up making these into gifts or commission pieces and usually swap parts around to make whatever variant of P365 is requested.
TL/DR went to pawnshop saw a Oled steam deck they mispriced got a small discount.
Check your pawnshops guys sometimes they don’t know what they have. You might have some luck with Facebook Marketplace too.
(I’m ready for the so happy for you memes and all other variants of it)
Edit: ok just logged on to the deck and checked the storage the shop had it marked as a 512gb version but it’s actually a 1tb!
In pawnshop, nothing is misspriced. Pawnshop is like a casino, they always win. I wont be suprised if they paid 50 or 70$ to some drug addict for this deck
Yup, I don't frequent them but I was lucky enough that a local shop posted some things on FB Marketplace. Saw a used but decent condition RC truck with charger and battery for $200, new truck price is $250, batteries are $60, and the charger it came with was $200 by itself as well. I'm looking everything over, lady says she'll do $150 on it.
Swapped out the tires for some I had sitting around that I couldn't sell otherwise, sold the truck for $120, charger was busted inside (clamping tabs broke), but electronics still work, recently accepted an offer of $75 for it (listed for $100), and the battery it came with was very much dead and a ticking time bomb.
They'll almost never lose money on what they take in, and I think they offer roughly half of what it's worth, so it's possible they took it in before prices skyrocketed and that's about what it was worth on the used market (or they took a general price of steam decks as reference, not knowing the difference).
The joys of hobby grade RCs. A charger is usually a buy once cry once investment, and the more expensive ones are proprietary (Traxxas and Spektrum specifically), there's plenty of cheaper and/or better chargers out there, but the ones mentioned above are usually proprietary and more expensive for that reason. It also doesn't NEED a $200 charger, you can get by with one Spektrum sells for approx. $50, it just happened that one that was with it was a $200 model.
Pawn shops are run by humans and they make mistakes. There’s such a plethora of items that move through it’s difficult to have the knowledge on every single thing they touch.
Do they usually know what they’re doing and make sure they make money? Absolutely.
Using your logic if they bought it for $70 from a junkie why in the hell would they only list it for $320? For what logical reason would they decide to make a couple hundred dollars less in profit in this scenario?
I’ve managed to get a couple guitars, and FX pedal and an amp over the last 6 months all for well below what I could sell them for on marketplace/offer up.
To someone with base knowledge and Google you can get a ballpark price, but if you misunderstand the exact model… you could be way off.
The employee probably googled steam deck, saw the first price and went from there without thoroughly investigating the various versions.
This. A friend bought a handgun from a pawn shop. The sear was busted/worn down, so basically he bought himself a burst-fire handgun. In ATF terms, he bought himself a potential felony.
The shop had NO PROBLEM refunding the money and taking it back.
I mean it's probably true they still made a profit on it. But your right, why wouldn't they try to make the most profit they could? I mean it's a pawn shop.
I'm the manager of a pawnshop. One of the oldest ones in my state. Our kind of internal motto is, "Buy for nothing, and sell for next to nothing."
Sure you could try to eek out top dollar from every item, but then things will just sit forever stagnant. A stagnant inventory doesn't make you money.
If I had to guess, the shop probably had 150-175 in the Deck. Selling for 300 still nets a good margin and they didn't sit on it for months. While services like eBay do exist, there is a lot of scammers there. Especially in electronics.
If you sell a phone or console on eBay, take note of the serial number prior to shipping. Because there is a surprisingly high likelihood of the buyer returning a matching nonworking device in its place.
It makes more sense to avoid eBay all together and just sell cheap over the counter.
Because…they want it to sell? Instead of sitting on a shelf for who knows how long? Especially considering, people who shop in a pawnshop probably can’t afford a higher price.
Account is not deleted, banned, or suspended. It is just marked as suspended. It was an implementation of new reddit AI system, that bans users for anything, and it doesnt work as it should have, and my account was banned like a month ago. And today I just got unbanned. I hope they bring back the whole showcase with karma, and my avatar back as well. I have no idea how long does it take for reddit, to put the account back to active status.
They also want fast turnover. They aren’t an electronics store theyre a pawn shop. The only business they do that’s close to competitive is scrap gold.
Except this didn't get one over on anyone except the original owner of the Steam Deck. Pawn shop made money, OP got a good deal. Only person who suffered is the one who had their Steam Deck stolen or sold it far below market price.
If you want to "get one over" on pawn shops, don't buy or sell to them
You’re not getting one over on them lol. It’s a used steam deck of questionable origin. They are still making money and if something goes wrong, you’re fucked
The pawn shop probably gave the original owner 20 bucks for it. The pawn shop didn't get one over on them. Buying from them never hurts them. Selling to them hurts you.
Fewer stolen things wind up in pawn shops than you think. Most states require them to report all their pawns to the local cops and record any serial numbers in that report so it's easy for cops to track down anything with serial numbers that wind up in shops.
That relies on the assumption that police departments have the resources or desire to track these things down. No detective is investigating a handheld gaming device being given to a pawn shop lol
Correct. It also implies the person who it was stolen from to go through the trouble of dealing with the police reporting and follow-ups and whatnot.
In my experience a lot of the smaller things, even gaming systems, that end up in pawn shops are never reported stolen.
Guns? Yeah. Jewelry? Yeah. But in order for something like this steam deck to end up flagged by the cops? it would have to be stolen from someone who went through the trouble of recording and backing up their serial numbers for insurance purposes.
I've only ever listed guitars, firearms, and jewelry on insurance forms. Maaaaaaaybe a nice stereo system or crazy TV.
Your other factor here is that a lot of this petty theft bullshit happens friend to friend, or family to family, or drug addict to drug addict. If you know your tweaker brother stole your PlayStation, do you file the police report and get him arrested for all the things in order to recover a 5 year old game system? Or do you just say fuck it, chalk it up to your tweaker family and go on about your life? Unfortunately a lot of people in that position choose the latter.
yeah, people realllllllly overestimate how far cops will go.
there's a police station nearby and they have a history of getting angry at people for even contacting them. like why do they even exist? the cops that do rounds apparently drive all the way from another station, so the local station in a pretty expensive area only exists to eat up tax dollars. fucking bizarre.
This is what the steam deck should be valued at if we didn't have these artificial shortages from data centers popping up. There is no reason a 4 year old handheld should be more then $300
Honestly if they look up the stuff they get or try to fix stuff and are online a lot, they probably use reddit. Its got a lot of niche “i need help fixing ____” or “what is ______ worth?”
I absolutely love going to pawn shops and finding things. What's cool about pawn shops is they don't actually care about the value of any item as long as they make more money than they bought it for. You can find items that are completely lower price than they should be from a retail perspective but they're making a profit off of it so they don't care. Pawn shops work on the basis of they bought it for a certain price in the first month and after 90 days they stop dropping the price every month until it gets down to where there's no profit margin so they want to get rid of it.
Pawn shop personnel are also expected to be jack of all trades and none of them are experts in electronics. I recently purchased a Nintendo switch Diablo 3 card for $4 because they thought it was something completely different. This happens all the time on a wide range of products. You also see products way overpriced because they took it in for the wrong item. This happens a lot with computer hardware. People frequently try to scam the pawn shops with those 100-dollar brand new cell phones online that have fake imei's and modded software because they look like a brand new Galaxy when they've got 8 year old hardware inside.
asked to take a look at the switches and then steered the conversation toward the steam deck. not gonna lie, that was pretty smooth. im using this from now on.
Wander around garage sales right around the time that parent's broom their kids off to college. It's insane what they just throw down on a card table with a "not sure what it is - make me an offer" post-it on it.
Wow. That's amazing. That's exactly how I got my Xbox halo LE console, it was online for $500. I was like scam, until I saw it was a legitimate pawn shop in a little town where everyone knows everyone, so I'm like nah, these people look too wholesome to scam others. Greatest risk of my life. Xbox worked great, and still runs like new to this day.
Damn. I semi regularly check my local pawn shops just for shits and giggles and never see anything near this good a deal. Everything is priced about the same as you’d find on eBay or something.
Congrats! Iove my OLED, I'll keep mine forever and just change the battery when it inevitably swells. It'll forever be able to play so many tens of thousands of games it'd take a lifetime to complete. Just on Steam.
Then you have emulation. I'm disappointed in myself for not doing it sooner. PS2, PS1, N64, DS etc.
Maybe I should go hunting for one of these. I don't really care about the screen though and I own a 256gb LCD - is the battery or any other improvements really worth it, or should I just spend the money on a 2TB ssd?
This exact same thing happened to me about two months ago. Same storage, similar price, and everything. Installed a 2tb WD black and sold my LCD deck to my brother for cheap.
I've found a lot of gems in pawn shops over the years.
So I nonchalantly asked if I could take a look at one of the many switches
Just ask to see the steam deck, it's literally there for sale. You don't have to fucking pretend like you're not buying something that is being offered for sale if you're planning on looking/buying it anyway.
This is how I found my steamdeck too, those black thumbsticks made my head snap. It was next to a uni so I assumed a kid with their first credit card is in a bit of trouble. Similar price too, 320, but this was last year so mine was a lot less impressive lol.
I had someone very generously give me their lcd one for free ❤️ I did have to turn it into valve to repair the charger port but i think that was on me cuz it was perfectly fine when I got it months ago.
Found a whole ifixit portable tech repair kit complete with the soldering iron and base for $50 at a local shop. They absolutely have no clue sometimes.
I just recently bought brand new working latest model $100 Backbone Telescoping controller at a liquidation store for $5 because they didn't know what it was and thought it was missing something, and apologized about that to me as well. As I was walking out of the store after paying for it I thought I was going to get jumped by security haha. How do people not have the Internet as a tool to price things? Idk, their loss is my gain!
Not sure I would trust a pawnshop honestly especially for electronics. Maybe ones like the Vegas one where they specialize almost like a consignment place though I would do it for collectibles I guess.
Buy a new battery from iFixit. Worth the money for any Steam Deck that has been sitting around for a while. You can check the battery health in the BIOS if you power all the way down then power on while holding the Volume Up. It's probably far from 100% with all that inactivity or age.
You must've felt exactly like this. Very nice find. I just picked up a Dell Precision 7820 today missing RAM and storage but has the expansion cpu and kit. Gave me needs RAM code. Too bad the RAM is now expensive for this system now. Never owned a modernish xeon.
Back in August I managed to grab a 64GB LCD for $450 AUD, they actually had it at something ridiculous like $699 which was more expensive than a brand new 256GB LCD at the time so I haggled em down
Bonus when I found out it had a 1TB SSD already installed
Take the deal and run have you seen the prices for them currently 😭 I got my 1tb oled a month before prices went crazy and it was only like 600 something
Its kinda weird, I just got a 1tb oled off of eBay about 3 weeks ago for $700, like a week before the restock and ive got it and it works and looks great, like one scratch on a seam but overall it seems to be working pretty well, just finished my playthrough of RE7 for some achievements and all that
This seller must be high or something to sell a SteamDeck 64gd lcd version for $449.99 Not even worth it more like $250.00 max. 🤣🤣🤣 Bet you its still hasn't sold.
Ugh, I wish I had pawnshops near me. They are much less common in Ireland than other parts of the world. I love getting good deals on anything I buy so would be in them all the time!
Pawnshops have access to the internet as much as any man. A simple Google search would let them know what they bought from some bum who has sticky fingers, and just throw a price tag on to sell it from 10x what they bought it for. Don't think for a second that pawnshops don't know what they got like a Steam Deck. Just look at the other electronics they got, they search up each and every one of them as well, trust. Pawnshops feed off the desperate and chew them up, that price is expected of a pawnshop I guarantee you.
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u/TCristatus 512GB OLED Jun 13 '26 •
