Kelly,

You are trying to go backwards to a non-normalized design. There should be one table that ahs one record per pawn ticket that is related to the table you showed based on ticket number. But the detail lines for the ticket should remain as you posted them.

This is not a waste of space. In fact it saves space this way. How large would you make that one field in your proposed table? Would you make it large enough to hold 10 items, then what happens to a ticket that has only one item? Do you leave the space empty for the other 9 items? With the spearate table, as you posted, there are only record for items that exist, thus no wasted space on tickets with less items. There is also virtually no limit on the number of items for a ticket, because all you do is add another record for the line.