New Glen Ellyn Ordinance Regulates Secondhand Stores

The Glen Ellyn Board of Trustees has unanimously passed an ordinance forcing secondhand store owners to photograph much of their merchandise intake and enter it into a database, a measure aimed at curbing the resale of stolen goods, the Chicago Tribune reports.

According to the paper, Glen Ellyn police say the ordinance, which also stipulates that store owners must take information for sellers and hold items for four days before selling or melting them down, will make it easier to recover people’s stolen items from a database. (Some items, like coins, are exempt.)

In the past, criminal activity was seen most in pawnshops. More recently, however, it has grown to include "virtuarlly every jewelry store," Glen Ellyn Deputy Police Chief Bill Holmer wrote in a Jan. 22 department memo.

"In some cases, we can get the arrest without the recovery but what interests us is being able to make the victim as whole as possible," Triblocal quoted Glen Ellyn Deputy Police Chief Bill Holmer saying. "We're not trying to make life difficult for [businesses]… The whole purpose is to try to recover some of this merchandise, and the more villages and towns that adopt this, the more items will be recovered."

But secondhand-store owners are fretting about the cost to their livelihoods. "I'm fearful about how much business I'll lose,” said Gabe Sanna, owner of Gabe’s. “In this economy, you can't afford to lose 20 to 30 percent of your business.”

Holmer wrote police received quite a bit of negative feedback from business owners at an October meeting on the proposed ordinance.

After hearing from business owners, village trustees in January tabled an earlier version of the ordinance that would have included bike and antique shops, required business owners to pay a $250 license fee to use the database and enter coins and currency into the database, according to the Daily Herald.

Read the full story at the Chicago Tribune website.

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