#swapsity

Today I was a bit sick so I couldn’t reflect on my experience on our little swapsity at school today. Instead I will try to talk about my opinion on bartering and what service I would have given to the community.

Bartering is the key. This will be the solution to all our problems when the economy starts to fail and society devolves back somewhere down to the early 1900s. Bartering makes perfect sense at its core, trading services or goods for other services or goods and making an agreement between two people to exchange one thing for another. The assumption is that two people would have an honest contract, nothing more than a firm handshake. This would work for most people, as I believe most people are good and honest. However, some people are not honest and those are who you need to be aware of when the subject of bartering comes up.

Bartering isn’t new. It has been used as a form of economy since the earliest of times. Before there was money, everyone bartered. If you had chickens and eggs, you may barter with the blacksmith to fix your wagon wheel. You and the blacksmith would agree upon the amount of eggs or chickens that equaled the work of fixing the wagon wheel. Bartering isn’t something that has disappeared over the course of time either. Lots of people still barter today. For example, remember when you were a little kid and you would trade a Twinkie for chocolate pudding? This is a clear form of barter.

I do believe that if we have an economic collapse, we will see a huge renewal of bartering, but for bartering to work, you will need something to trade. What if you have nothing to barter with? No goods or supplies to trade? You can trade labor. This is exactly what I would have done if I were at school. My service would have been tutoring students for an amount of time and they would have to give something back in return for the amount of hours I spent teaching them.

Links:

http://www.knocktwiceblog.com/2011/11/16/bartering-your-services/

Swapsity is Canadian bartering community that matches you with local swappers so you can save money and live greener. It's free to join and swap!

Today we had a swapsity of our own in class.  Swapsity is when we swap items within each other.  Basically a barter system.  I started off with two hackeysack’s and ended with 1 cookie, 1 gatorade and still a hackeysack left.  I personally believe that I made some great trades.  

Swapsity is Canadian bartering community that matches you with local swappers so you can save money and live greener. It's free to join and swap!

We have been studying different forms of economic systems, but are there other ways to gain the things that we want/need? This Thursday, we found out just that.

Yesterday, 50 students came together, all bringing at least one item to trade in a “swapsity” (much like the one in Toronto which you can find out about by looking at the link). We had to consider our values and what we were reflecting by trading certain things. I brought some chocolates to the table, and ended up trading once to get a San Pellegrino. This was a valuable trade for me since that I did not like the milk chocolate that I had brought, and I actually quite like the drink.

A few things that came to mind throughout this experience was supply and demand. There were quite a few cookies that were there to trade, but the demand was about equal so there wasn’t too much competition. A free Starbucks delivery, however, had a lower supply and higher demand, so there was a lot of competition.

I also noticed a couple of different services being offered. The first was 12 cookies, 6 chocolate chip and 6 shortbread. The second offer was 12 cookies of anything. The second offer was higher in demand than to the other one, because it could be any cookie that you want. If you don’t like chocolate chip or shortbread, then you are out of luck with the first offer. But with the second, you could choose one that you want.

Today we held a swapsity event where we were able to bring goods or provide services in exchange for other ones; this was meant to resemble a different economic system, like bartering or trading. While selecting the objects that I was willing to trade, I had to consider many concepts including values, supply v.s. demand, quality of life, etc. 

An interesting idea that I learned was that it is complicated determining how trustworthy the people you are trading with are. In a bartering system, the other individual does not have any proof or certification that they are legitimate, and there is no consumer protection or warranties involved. This means that the goods and services you are exchanging may be exchanged for poor or defective items, or vice versa. An evident example of this was shown when I traded my pens from india, and the reality was that they did not work. Everyone wanted them because of their looks, but I got much more out of it than a worthless decorative pen. We must understand at times, it is easy to think the item you desire is worth more than it actually is and underestimate the value of your own item.

From participating in this activity, we got a little taste of how supply and demand plays into nearly all economic systems, including bartering. To elaborate, I brought a variety of unique things and made sure to bring limited amounts so that if there was a demand, it would be high meaning that the prices would be competitively high as well! My strategy worked quite well, as many of my classmates wanted the elephant key chains and indian pens I brought. Further expanding on this topic, this also incorporates the idea that high demand products are often scarce in amount, thus referring that there will be more competition for consumers who value it.

"One man's trash is another man's treasure." ~ Tom Zart speaks to the economic system that we tried to build in our classroom, where we move away from utilizing money and instead recycle our goods and services. By eliminating money from our economy, we are not saying that we can live on just trading our products. Producers will still need to be involved in creating more products to keep this system running, therefore we can never break the chain of consumerism.

We had the interesting opportunity to partake in a swapsity. take a look at the articles at the end of this post to learn more about what a swapsity is, and how it is a new take on consumerism. In a class of 50 people, we each brought in a product or service to trade as we see fit with an item/service of similar value. It was very interesting to see who bargained for what and how much people traded their items for. Our values shape us as a consumer and so trading physical objects on the spot exemplifies these very evidently. For example people who value quantity over quality looked for products that came in abundance while people who valued quality chose objects that were better (for lack of a better term) quality than those that were not.

I think this concept would be a very positive thing to implement into our society as it will reduce waste and promote the reusing of products. This will not only help us save money to use for other things (taxes, etc.) but we can create stronger local communities. Embracing this idea with an open mind will create not only healthier individual consumerism identities, but collective consumer identities.

This was a GREAT IDEA!

I loved this activity so much! I brought in these temporary tattoos that i’ve had forever just laying around and i honestly thought that not many people would want them but eventually after doing several trades and trading the trades i got a huge brownie, one cookie, paper-crane lessons, 2 boxes of dots, piano lessons, and a cherry tart from half a plastic bag of temporary tattoos.

so either i’m amazing at trading or people were just as surprised as me that someone else actually wanted their product!