The Most Expensive Item Featured On Pawn Stars
Part of the thrill of Pawn Stars is the negotiation of prices that'll make your eyes bulge out of your skull and the suspense as to whether the employees of Gold and Silver Pawn Shop will ultimately say yes or no. The other part of the thrill, of course, is the crazy variety of items themselves. The show has seen Super Bowl championship rings, instruments once owned by famous musicians, gold collected from centuries-old shipwrecks — anything and everything viewers could imagine, really. Season after season, it seems like people never run out of interesting things to bring to the shop.
Every once in a while, though, the Gold and Silver employees have to leave the shop to check out potential items. There are plenty of reasons for this, ranging from the size of the item (like Robosaurus — which almost got its own video game) to the way it needs to be displayed. Sometimes, though, it's simply a matter of value; an owner not wanting to carry around an item worth millions out in the open is totally understandable. Such is the case with an item Rick Harrison encounters in the 500th episode — the most expensive item to ever be featured on the show.
The asking price made this Pawn Stars deal fall through
Relics of Americana aren't uncommon on Pawn Stars, but it's not every day the Gold and Silver employees come across something owned by George Washington himself. Most memorabilia associated with the Revolutionary War general — presidential or otherwise — can be found in prominent museums or in his Virginia home, Mount Vernon. Washington's three-piece suit featured on the show, however, belonged to a private collector and dealer named Brian. Being so old, the suit lost its original pink hue long before Brian purchased it at an auction in New York City, though traces of it are still visible when the camera zooms in. Either way, Rick — himself a huge fan of the first president — is absolutely floored by the find, confirmed to be the real deal by a historian.
What floors him even more, however, is Brian's asking price: a whopping $3 million. As Rick admits, though, "I've been offered items in the millions of dollars before, but I've never really considered them... until now." Unfortunately, as sometimes happens, negotiations fall through on Pawn Stars, with Brian unwilling to part with the suit for less than $2.5 million. Either way, the fact that Rick got to see such an incredible piece of history — and that viewers got to see it because of him — is incredible in its own right.