189 businesses across 14 Canadian cities that buy used goods from the public — pawn shops, consignment, gold buyers, scrap yards, auto salvage and electronics buy-back. Each one checked against its own website, with the transaction spelled out, because a pawn loan and a sale are not the same thing.
We do not publish an average payout, because nobody publishes one. Any site quoting you "typically 60% of retail" invented it. Across 189 businesses in fourteen cities, a handful publish a consignment split, one publishes a per-gram gold table, and not one pawn shop, scrap yard or electronics buyer publishes what it pays relative to resale value.
What we can tell you is the shape of it. Consignment pays the most and pays last, often on a declining scale as the item sits. An outright sale pays least and pays today. Metals and gold are weight times purity minus a spread nobody states, so the only real number is the one at the scale. And for a great deal of what comes out of a cleared house — flat-pack furniture, book-club paperbacks, old encyclopedias, out-of-season sports gear, adult clothing more than a few years old — the honest answer is that nobody in these fourteen cities will pay anything for it at all. The refusal lists below are the evidence.
Most of what people clear out is worth nothing to a dealer and perfectly useful to somebody else. We keep a separate, equally checked guide to the charities that will take it.
Where to donate it