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They make it a habit not to suspect anything that isn't blatantly thrown in their faces. Plausible deniability. If someone walks in and says, "Yeah, I want to pawn this item that I stole--er, I mean, I want to pawn this item," then yes, they would decline to give any money for it, probably under the pretense that they already had too many on the shelves.
There's really no recourse to prove that a powertool is stolen anyway, it's not like the construction contractor is going to have the serial numbers of dozens of tools written down, or visit every pawnshop looking for them when one is stolen.
And there is that one percent, every once in awhile you do get a small-time contractor pawning his own tools for cash--but you can tell they're legit because they always come get them back. Things for sale in a pawnshop are by definition the things that people never came to get back.
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