Laguna Tourists Are Sold on Consignment : Shopping: Upscale hand-me-downs and a steady supply of visitors make the resort city the consignment capital of Southern California.

This hardly seems like a hand-me-down town.

The average household income is $55,000, a two-bedroom house can fetch as much as $1.9 million and Mercedes-Benzes battle each other for the scarce parking meter. Fancy eateries and elegant art galleries mingle with jewelry stores and souvenir shops.

So it may come as a surprise to discover that Laguna Beach is quite possibly the consignment capital of Southern California. This tiny seaside resort has at least eight consignment stores, more than even Los Angeles if Yellow Pages listings are any measure.

“I started this idea here 17 years ago,” said Jackie Haworth, co-owner of On Consignment. “They are all over the place now.”

Consignment shops deal mostly in used furniture, clothing and other articles for which a seller pays a commission--typically about 35%--to the retailer when an article is sold. The advantage to the sellers is that their goods are seen by a steady flow of potential buyers, and they avoid the hassle of trying to sell the goods at their homes.

Laguna’s leftovers differ from those of most cities--hair dryers, lampshades, bowling shirts and the like. Consignment shops here sell 19th-Century furniture, Baccarat crystal, antique jewelry and artwork, among other upscale items. Browsers can find everything from armoires and Chinese vases to 150-year-old perfume bottles and neon Marilyn Monroe clocks.

With the economy on the skids, consignment shops are increasingly popular.

“People are looking for better buys,” said Tom Campbell, co-owner of the Great Exchange Consignment Co.

Haworth’s shop usually sells $3,000 to $4,000 worth of goods on a weekend but is now doing that much business on some weekdays. Campbell said his business has been so profitable that he opened a second store in Laguna four years ago.

“We’ve done really well,” Haworth said. “You don’t have that many more sellers but you have far more bargain hunters. They are thinking how far their dollar goes.”

Laguna’s eclectic population mix of elderly residents, transients and tourists makes the city a perfect breeding ground for consignment shops. Transients commonly leave behind their valuables, and elderly people often want to sell homes full of furniture when they move to smaller residences. The tourists do most of the buying.

And, of course, Laguna has something that many cities don’t--the idle rich.

Haworth says one of the best types of clients is “the housewife that is a frustrated designer and just likes to change her house frequently. She has six dining room sets in one year. It’s kind of like a hobby.”

When a person wants to sell something but doesn’t know what price to ask, consignment shops will often appraise the goods.

The system isn’t foolproof.

Consider, for instance, the oil print Haworth once sold for $10.

“Someone came in and said, ‘This print would be worth thousands of dollars if it was an original,’ ” she recalled. The print’s lucky new owner had it appraised after the purchase and discovered it was an original.

Then there was the case of the Tibetan prayer rugs.

“We went to this lady’s house and she had a little pile of rugs in the corner,” said Haworth. “She said, ‘I’d sell these to you for $25.’ ”

Haworth--like most consignment shops--never buys something outright. She agrees to research each item’s real value before offering them for sale in her shop.

The rugs, as it happened, were exceptionally rare.

“One sold for $3,000, one sold for $2,000 and the last one had an offer of $2,000,” said Haworth. The woman who just a month earlier was willing to sell all the rugs for $25, turned down the $2,000 offer.

Haworth concedes that appraisal is an imperfect art.

“There is not one person who can be an expert in everything,” she said.

Prices at consignment shops can range from a few dollars to the tens of thousands. To ensure a changing mix of goods, most shops periodically mark down prices on merchandise to keep it moving. On Consignment, for instance, discounts goods 10% a week after they’ve gone unsold for a month.

Every consignment store in Laguna has a different feel to it.

On Consignment is a cozy affair, its bookshelves lined with Junior League cookbooks from around the country. The Laguna Playhouse borrows furniture for its productions and pays the owner with a complimentary show ticket. One of the store’s customers liked the store so much that he gave Haworth $1,000 to refinish the floor.

Going to Great Exchange is like signing up for a treasure hunt.

On the first floor--among the armoires and consoles--are finds such as the Marilyn Monroe custom-design neon clock ($1,150) and Zoltan the Fortune Teller ($1,600), a mechanical soothsayer. Downstairs a buyer can find a watercolor portrait of Barbra Streisand and a street sign from Bob Hope Drive in Palm Springs.

Campbell once sold a hand-carved wooden elephant from Ringling Bros.

“The elephant weighed several tons, barely cleared the door and took up our entire window,” said Campbell. “It was sold to a toy collector for in excess of $10,000.”

The elephant is now said to be insured by Lloyd’s of London for more than $200,000.