Pawn shop turf wars

As if the ubiquitous Cash4Gold nonsense plaguing television ad space isn't enough, here in West Hartford, we have a bevy of local "celebrities" that, more than anything in the world, want to buy our old jewelry.

Didn't you hear, we're in a recession! You HAVE to have gold and jewels you want to sell, right? Right?

For those from out of the area, let me give you a quick rundown of who I'm talking about. First up is our heavy hitters. There are two, with the most famous being "I want to give it to ya" Tom from Good Ole Tom's:

   

What a creepy man. He just has that dead stare. It gives me the shivers. 

Moving on . . .

The second of the pawn shop heavy hitters is Fast Eddy, a guy who really likes making movie parodies in his ads:

He does another one inspired by The Godfather in which you can barely tell what anyone's saying. I find Eddy entertaining, if not annoyingly ubiquitous.

Then we have the dark horse of this pawn race. There's a place called Silas Deane Pawn. It's an outfit in Wethersfield that, instead of having an actual website, offers up a blogspot page that contains photos of friends and music playlists (what this has to do with making the public confident in a business, I have no idea. "Come sell us your old watches, and while you're at it, listen to this hot Rage Against The Machine track I got on my store's blog!"). 

I guess they're trying to sound like Arnold Schwarzenegger in this ad, though it's kind of hard to tell:

So, there's the quick rundown. And, all things considered, these three guys seem to stay pretty clear of each other. You don't see Tom bashing Eddy or Eddy bashing Tom or Torn-Jeans-Arnold badmouthing either Scarface or the Cowboy. If there is a rivalry, it seems fairly friendly.

Or so I thought.

There's another pawn shop in the area, and they're looking for a fight. They're called EZ Money, and this is the ad that they ran in the newest issue of the Hartford Advocate:

Not the cowboy hat! That's Tom's image, like Elvis Costello's glasses or "The Shark" from local NBC affiliate reporter Mark The Shark! 

A gauntlet has been thrown. The war has begun. Just wait, next we'll see EZ Money calling Eddy "slow" and the Silas Deane guys "not Austrian" or "inappropriately dressed for a television commercial." 

This is not going to end well. I can feel the terror building. This must have been what New York felt like in the movie The Warriors.

"Good Ole Tom . . . come out and playyyyyyy."

(I think this is the second blog post I've ended with a rendition of that quote)