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Cash America: How the familiar lessons of retail growth are building yet another chain — of pawn shops.

The core tenets of building a retail chain are well known. The stores need to be consistent and welcoming — a brand you can trust. This idea has guided chains for decades. It guides recent iterations selling organic vegetables, expensive lattes and well-designed kitchenware to what has been called the “mass affluent” consumer. And it guides chains of pawnshops. It turns out that there are several such chains, the biggest of which is Cash America: from one location in 1983 it has grown to 468 today, and it reported 2005 revenue of about $600 million….

Continue reading at the NYT Magazine site via this no-registration-required link.

Also worth reading the Magazine this week (a special issue on debt): One of my favorites, Jackson Lears, on “The American Way of Debt,” and Niall Ferguson on “Reasons To Worry” about declining household savings, rising home-mortgage debt, and the trade deficit.