Tony Wang11 min read72% of America's Pawn Shops Still Aren't Owned by a Chain
We mapped 8,705 US pawn shops. FirstCash and EZPAWN, the two public consolidators, capture under a third — and the density map lines up with unbanked America.
Every category this series has mapped so far has shown some degree of chain penetration — visible in self-storage, heavier in hotels and gas stations, near-total in coffee. Pawn shops break that pattern. The industry has a real, decades-old, publicly-traded consolidator sitting right at the center of it — and the data shows that consolidator still doesn't own the market.
The word "Pawn" breaks text search entirely
Every prior post in this series has run into some version of a generic word swallowing a category's search results — "Bank" inside category=bank, "Car Wash" inside category=car_wash. Pawn shops are the most extreme case yet.
| Query (within category=pawn_shop) | Raw match count | Share of category | What it actually measures |
|---|---|---|---|
| q="Pawn" | 6,227 | 71.5% | Almost the entire category — nearly every pawn shop has "Pawn" in its name |
| q="Value Pawn" | 6,229 | 71.6% | Re-finds the word "Pawn," not the Value Pawn & Jewelry brand |
| q="First Cash Pawn" | 6,505 | 74.7% | Same failure — OR-token matching on "Pawn" |
| q="Cash America Pawn" | 6,500 | 74.7% | Same failure again |
| q="EZPAWN" | 371 | 4.3% | Clean — single fused token, no OR-split possible |
Only EZPAWN survives as a usable direct-search brand query, because it's written as one fused word with no space for the search to split on. Every other major player's storefront name is built around the word "Pawn" itself, which makes text search useless for measuring them individually. That single fact is also the reason this post exists: it's very easy to look at this category, run an obvious-looking query, get a huge number back, and conclude the wrong thing entirely.
Domain classification: still a fragmented industry
To get a real read on chain penetration, we pulled two independent 100%-websited samples (500 records and 200 records, from different pages of a recency-sorted feed) and classified each listing by its website's domain — the same method this series used to catch Extra Space Storage's merger-driven sampling spike and to measure Wyndham's and Choice's hotel footprints.
| Domain | Owner | Sample 1 (n=500) | Sample 2 (n=200) |
|---|---|---|---|
| firstcash.com | FirstCash, Inc. (NASDAQ: FCFS) | 97 (19.4%) | 45 (22.5%) |
| ezpawn.com | EZCORP, Inc. (NASDAQ: EZPW) | 41 (8.2%) | 16 (8.0%) |
| valuepawnandjewelry.com | FirstCash, Inc. (Florida brand) | 2 (0.4%) | 6 (3.0%) |
| facebook.com | No standalone site — Facebook page only | 22 (4.4%) | 8 (4.0%) |
Combined, FirstCash's domains (firstcash.com + valuepawnandjewelry.com) plus EZPAWN's account for 28.0% of the first sample and 33.5% of the second — consistent enough across two independently pulled samples to trust the range, and both land well under a third. The first sample alone had 294 unique domains among 500 websited listings — no single independent operator repeating more than 5 times. That's a long, flat tail of one-location shops, not a market with a handful of regional players waiting to be found.
Geography: the South is the pawn shop belt
Show the full state-by-state pawn shop density ranking
| Rank | State | Pawn shops | Per 1M residents |
|---|---|---|---|
| 1 | Arkansas | 234 | 75.8 |
| 2 | West Virginia | 109 | 61.6 |
| 3 | Mississippi | 170 | 57.8 |
| 4 | Montana | 65 | 57.2 |
| 5 | Oklahoma | 223 | 54.5 |
| 6 | Kentucky | 228 | 49.7 |
| 7 | Alabama | 242 | 46.9 |
| 8 | Georgia | 518 | 46.3 |
| 9 | Wyoming | 25 | 42.5 |
| 10 | Texas | 1,243 | 39.7 |
| 11 | Florida | 914 | 39.1 |
| 12 | South Dakota | 33 | 35.7 |
| 13 | Tennessee | 245 | 33.9 |
| 14 | Alaska | 25 | 33.8 |
| 15 | North Carolina | 368 | 33.3 |
| 44 | New Jersey | 92 | 9.7 |
| 45 | Pennsylvania | 118 | 9.0 |
| 46 | Massachusetts | 63 | 8.8 |
| 47 | District of Columbia | 6 | 8.5 |
| 48 | Wisconsin | 40 | 6.7 |
Grouping 14 Southern and border states (Texas, Florida, Georgia, Alabama, Mississippi, Louisiana, Arkansas, Tennessee, South Carolina, North Carolina, Oklahoma, Kentucky, West Virginia, Virginia) against the rest of the country makes the pattern explicit: 40.1 pawn shops per 1M residents in the South, versus 17.1 per 1M everywhere else — a 2.35x gap. This isn't just Texas and Florida pulling up an average with sheer population; nine of the top ten states by per-capita rate are in that same Southern bloc, and the size-adjusted leaders (Arkansas, West Virginia, Montana) aren't even the biggest population states in the group.
The control case: laundromats show no equivalent story
Before settling on pawn shops, we checked category=laundromat (27,389 US listings — more than 3x the pawn shop count) for a similar consolidation angle. It isn't there. A single-record sample check surfaced no recognizable national chain, and there is no publicly-traded laundromat consolidator anywhere near FirstCash's scale to search for. Laundromats appear to be genuinely, uniformly fragmented — useful as a control case confirming that pawn shops' ~70% independent share is a real, below-average level of consolidation for a retail category on this dataset, not simply an artifact of how small local businesses get counted here.
How we did this, and the caveats
| What | Detail |
|---|---|
| Category totals | datasets_google_map_facets on category=pawn_shop, country=United States — 8,705 listings, 50 states + DC |
| Chain share | Two independent domain-classification samples (n=500, n=200), has_website=true, sort=updated_at_desc, different result pages |
| FirstCash US store count | FirstCash Holdings, Inc. 2025 Form 10-K (1,207 US stores as of Dec 31, 2025) |
| EZCORP store count | EZCORP, Inc. FY2025 results (1,360 stores across 5 countries; US-only breakout not separately disclosed) |
| Unbanked rates | FDIC 2023 National Survey of Unbanked and Underbanked Households |
| Per-capita rankings | State facet counts divided by US Census Bureau Vintage 2024 state population estimates |
Caveats worth stating plainly: the 28-34% combined FirstCash/EZPAWN share is a sample-relative estimate, not a national extrapolation — we're reporting what share of a recency-sorted, websited sample links to those two companies' domains, not claiming that exact percentage of all 8,705 listings nationally. A recency-sorted sample can over- or under-represent any given chain relative to independents depending on how often each updates its Maps listings, which is exactly why we pulled two independent samples rather than trusting one. FirstCash's 1,207-store figure is a real, audited number from its own public filing, included as an external anchor — not derived from this dataset. EZCORP's US-specific store count isn't separately broken out in its most recent results, so we couldn't build the same clean cross-check for EZPAWN that we could for FirstCash. And as with every study on this dataset: it's live-growing, so a re-pull months from now may show incremental shifts.
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Frequently asked questions
How consolidated is the US pawn shop industry?
Much less than most retail categories this series has measured. FirstCash and EZPAWN, the two publicly-traded pawn operators, together account for roughly 28-34% of a websited sample (two independent 500- and 200-record domain-classification pulls). That leaves well over two-thirds of the category as independent, single-location shops even after decades of acquisition activity.
Why can't you just search for FirstCash's brand names directly?
Because FirstCash operates under at least four consumer-facing names — First Cash Pawn, Cash America Pawn, Value Pawn & Jewelry, and SuperPrestamos — picked up through acquisitions, and every one of them contains the word "Pawn," which alone matches 71.5% of the entire category (6,227 of 8,705 listings) via this dataset's OR-token text search. Any multi-word query built around "Pawn" just re-finds almost the whole category rather than isolating the brand. Domain classification is the only reliable method here.
How many US pawn stores does FirstCash actually operate?
1,207 US stores as of December 31, 2025, per FirstCash Holdings' own 2025 Form 10-K — a real, audited, externally-sourced figure used here as a cross-check, not derived from the Google Maps dataset itself.
Which states have the most pawn shops per capita?
Arkansas leads at 75.8 pawn shops per 1 million residents, followed by West Virginia (61.6), Mississippi (57.8), Montana (57.2), and Oklahoma (54.5). The South as a bloc (14 states) runs 2.35x denser than the rest of the country — 40.1 per 1M versus 17.1 per 1M.
Is pawn shop density related to banking access?
The geography overlaps. The FDIC's 2023 survey found Mississippi has the nation's highest unbanked household rate (9.4%) and Louisiana the second-highest (8.1%); both states also rank above the national pawn shop density rate in this dataset. This echoes an earlier finding in this series that the same Southern states have the thinnest physical bank branch coverage in the country.