1．Pawn shops are businesses where people bring their possessions to sell or to get a short-term loan. Pawn shops may be large or small, clean or dirty, but they are all full of stories. The United States has about ten thousand of them.

2．In the past few years, pawn shops have been doing business with more people than ever before. That is because many lenders(贷方) now do business only with individuals having good credit records or a high-paying job.  Often, the individuals most in need of a loan have poor credit records. But they do not need a good job or credit record to get a loan from a pawnbroker(典当商). They only need to have something of value.

3．When a traditional lender agrees to provide a loan, it may take days or weeks before an individual receives the money. But pawnbrokers will give a loan in just a few minutes based on the resale value of an object and without asking about the person's job or credit history.

4．Many pawn shops specialize in jewelry. But most shops accept almost anything of value, including computers, musical instruments, guns, old coins and so on. The item itself acts as the security, or collateral(抵押物), for the loan. If the loan is not repaid, the object can be sold. Customers can get the object back at any time by repaying the loan plus the interest and fees they agreed to pay. Or they can pay the interest and leave the item at the pawn shop for a while longer.

5．The National Pawnbrokers Association is a national trade group representing pawnbrokers. The association calls pawn-brokering "one of humankind's oldest financial institutions." It says pawnbrokers operated three thousand years ago in ancient China and in early Greek and Roman times.

If customers want to get their objects back they must _____.