Food, Home and Style

Redux: Barter is Back

Looking back at the Great Depression to see the path ahead.

If past crises are any indication, a cash shortage won’t stop the wheels of commerce.

During the1930s, people without money started trading goods and services as a way to keep themselves afloat. Workers exchanged labor for room and board. Students traded farm produce for tuition. Moonshiners, bless them, exchanged goods with just about everybody.

People with skills in high demand did especially well. Someone who could bake delicious bread or sew quality clothing could draw people from miles around to barter for their products. Eventually, people established more formalized barter groups like The Unemployed Citizens League, which had 200,000 members across the country at its peak.

In The New Deal, Ronald Edsforth shows how some groups acted as cheap labor exchanges. Southern California’s Unemployed Cooperative Relief Association, for example, used the slogan “Self Help Beats Charity” to urge families to trade labor in fruit and vegetable fields for food. People interested in self-sufficiency were moved to experiment. The legendary economist Ralph Borsodi organized cash-strapped suburbanites in New York and other cities to trade clothes, furniture, and even artwork for food in barter groups.

Bartering is as old as human history, and it’s not necessary to bring a pig to market to make it work. It’s something all of us have done, in the form of a book swap or a potluck dinner. The recession has brought back an interest in bartering as a way for people to sustain themselves and protect cash flow. No money is changing hands, but each party is giving and getting something in return.

As the downturn continues, more people will be bartering their skills, and some will even be able to turn those skills into lucrative businesses. People with a knack for specialty gardening can gain bartering leverage by producing hard-to-grow herbs and organic vegetables. Those who know foreign languages can trade on translations skills. Smart folks will be thinking of both what they enjoy doing and what they imagine might be in demand in their particular region.

On Craigslist, bartering offers are skyrocketing as people grow cash-poor and can’t use their maxed-out credit cards. A recent browsing of Craigslist New York revealed people bartering tax preparation services, cooking, personal training, guitar lessons, and resume writing. One man offered to trade his litigation services for a reliable van. A photographer sought a stylist for bartering. There was even a psychotherapist offering services in exchange for piano tuning.

Bartering may not sounds as sexy as new-fangled practices like derivatives once did, but the ancient practice offers real value. In this economy, we’ll take it.

Tags: barter, economy, Great Depression, Redux