Is pawn stars fake?

Yes and no. The pawn shop is real and most of the people you see there are real.

However, most of the time when you're seeing the guys looking over a big ticket item, odds are it's one of the many items that they seed the show with. Especially if it's something that they need to call in an expert on.

If you watch carefully, you can see in some of those item segments where Rick says it'll be a couple of hours before my expert can come over...something interesting.

In a few of these, I noticed the people in the background shopping. "A couple of hours" later when the expert comes in, I've seen the same people.

Now I can browse a pawn shop that size and see everything that catches my eye in less than a half hour. I find it hard to believe that these same people are in the shop for as long as the two to three hours Rick claims it'll take to get the expert.

Yeah.

Yeah.

Its a real store ( in a novelty kind of way)

The show is mostly fake. Its an exaggerated series of anecdotes from the real pawn business

Yep, it is.

I don't know about that one but the drama on Hardcore Pawn seems staged.

That's just what it looks like to me personally. I try to find nuances of acting.

The events seem reenacted, but perhaps based on a real prior event.

if it ever was it was only at the beginning, now, 100% chance its fake

Yeah.

100 % fake.

There is a real pawn shop that the Harrison family owns. But many of the scenes are "faked" and many of the customers are "plants". If they filmed the ordinary things that 99% of all their customers the show would be boring. So they do arrange to have people with unique things to pawn, as well as set up friends and others to bring things in.

It is not so much "fake" as it is "staged." They arrange to have interesting things and people in the pawn shop at the time the filming is going on (And the stars do have some advance notice about items so that they can appear knowledgable about them.)

They are making entertainment, not a documentary.