Oh wow, I think my brother just used my name to #### things up. wow... anyway. I guess I should give my real opinion about pawn shops. I think pawn shops are an excellent thing because you can easily find cool guitars at a very cheap price but, The bad thing is you get some ass hole that runs a pawn shop and he gets a Fender mexican strat in and he's trying to sell it for $600 bucks. The reason being is he knows fender is a top brand in the guitar world but, he doesn't know you can go buy a brand new strat for $400. It's happened to me plenty of times before. Same thing with epiphone. They thinks it's a genuine gibson because it says gibson on the truss rod cover. So my advice is stick with the no name guitars.