Do Pawn Shops Buy Diabetic Test Strips?
Some do. It is usually the worst price available to you.
The short answer
A minority of pawn shops buy diabetic test strips, and those that do typically pay well under what a specialist buyer pays — often half. Pawn shops price for resale through a channel that is not set up for medical supplies, so they discount heavily for the risk and the slow turn. Whatever a pawn shop offers on a box of OneTouch Verio, a specialist buyer will generally pay considerably more for the same box.
Why the gap is so wide
A pawn shop's buyer has no downstream channel for strips, cannot verify dating or provenance with any confidence, and does not want inventory that expires. A specialist buyer has all three and prices accordingly.
Where pawn shops do make sense
Speed and anonymity, if those matter more to you than price. A pawn shop pays in the room with no scheduling. If you need cash in hand today and you only have a few boxes, that is a legitimate reason to take a worse price — just go in knowing it is a worse price.
What to check either way
Whoever you sell to, they should at least ask whether the boxes are sealed and how much time is left on the dates. A buyer who asks nothing and quotes a number sight-unseen is a buyer whose number changes when they arrive.
Compare against our published prices
What the record shows
Everything below is quoted or drawn from a primary source, linked so you can check it yourself rather than take our word for it. Full list on our sources and regulations page.
The Better Business Bureau has run 'We Buy Diabetic Test Strips' as a consumer scam warning, and BBB offices have logged hundreds of complaints against individual resale operations.
— Better Business Bureau, BBB Scam of the Week: 'We Buy Diabetic Test Strips', reported.
Local reporting has documented an active secondary market in diabetic testing supplies across metro Atlanta, operating with little regulation and wide variation in what buyers pay.
— Atlanta News First, Inside the booming underground economy of diabetic testing supplies, 2023.
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