Stop Buying, Start Bartering

Here in Bellingham, I've had a chance to practice bartering and trading.  We've traded yardwork for fresh ground beef, tax help for a delicious dinner, photography skills for handmade hats, housing for cooking meals, modeling for mushrooms, etc.  Sure, sometimes "trading" is just doing favors for friends.  But I recently asked a stranger who is a masseuse if she'd be interested in trading some of our fresh goat milk for massage, and she said, yeah!

Psh, that only happens in your weird hippie town in the Northwest, Caitlin.  That will never fly in the bustling metropolis where I live. Not true!  You just have to ask people.  Figure out what you have to offer: stuff you have, skills you have, chores you can do, etc.  Then, when you're ogling a brick of fudge in a candy shop window, ask the owner if she needs any website work done.  Just ask.  Bartering is cheap, it's efficient, and it builds trust and interdependence within a community.

And THEN...there's trading on the internet. No longer do you have to seek out a direct trading partner.  David Roberts' article in The Grist, "Sharing and caring: the implications of collaborative consumption," describes how technology has vastly increased the efficiency of trading:

It has become incredibly cheap to connect people so they can coordinate and exchange information. When I was a kid, growing up in Ancient Times, if I wanted to sell my old banana-seat bike and get a bike with gears, I had to call the newspaper, dictate a for-sale ad, and mail them a check. Or tack up flyers around public places. I might have found a buyer, but the time and effort required would have been substantial. And I would have had no way to pinpoint the real market value of the bike, i.e., how much the person who wanted it most would pay.

Now there are swapping websites for books, clothes, movies, jewelry, babysitting, houses...anything. "The basic characteristic of these you-name-it sharing marketplaces is that they extract value out of the stuff we already have," writes Danielle Sacks in her article "The Sharing Economy." This model, also called collaborative consumption, has huge potential from an environmental perspective.  We don't need to make more stuff if we can circulate the stuff that already exists.  That Iron Man DVD sitting on your shelf is just sitting there 99% of the time.  That's inefficient.  Sacks sums it up: "the central conceit of collaborative consumption is simple: Access to goods and skills is more important than ownership of them."  Think of car sharing, for example.  According to Rachel Botsman, author of What's Mine is Yours: The Rise of Collaborative Consumption, there are three systems of collaborative consumption:

• redistribution markets that cycle used items (Iron Man DVD)
• collaborative lifestyles: sharing skills, space, assets (coworking, couchsurfing, time banks)
• product service systems that help people share or rent a product (carsharing, bikesharing)

Danielle Sacks' article ends up focusing on how entrepreneurs are going to make a lot of money starting companies that facilitate sharing.  However, she points out that the sharing economy also poses a threat to corporate profits.  When I need an ice cream maker, I might go on NeighborGoods and rent one directly from someone in Bellingham instead of buying one at Target (not that I'd ever do that).  How beautifully efficient and interpersonal!  I look at barter as a way for people to practice fulfilling their needs through other people.  Corporations have taught us to fulfill our needs through buying stuff, but we've figured out that most of the time we don't use the stuff we have.

If you're yearning for more information, check out Shareable, a not-for-profit website that acts as a sort of sharing manual, "provid[ing] individuals and groups with a playbook for how to build systems for sharing everything from baby food and housing to skills and solar panels."  Also, here's a fun Ted talk with Rachel Botsman.  One cool idea she talks about is a reputation report that would catalog your various online exchanges, so if you're an unreliable member of Paperback Swap, that information would carry over to your Zipcar reputation.  Interesting implications for privacy and whatnot, but very intriguing as an alternative to credit reports.