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.
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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.
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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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