Can't Find It at the Store? Try Bartering

The New York Times

August 3, 2020

By: A.C. Shilton

Can’t Find It at the Store?

Try Bartering

Credit...Fran Caballero

Here’s How to Do It Right

(and Fairly)

By A.C. Shilton

When the coronavirus pandemic hit, Kate Coffman, who works at Alliance Brewing Company in Knoxville, Tenn., knew cash was going to be tight for a while. Although her brewery has stayed open for takeout, she has worked fewer hours and business is down. When a friend, Angie Ervin, started a local bartering group on Facebook, Ms. Coffman was eager to join.

“It kind of blew up overnight,” Ms. Coffman said.

Soon, Ms. Ervin was begging Ms. Coffman to help her manage the group’s page. Since it started on April 5, the group, Knoxville Barters, has swelled to more than 2,200 members.

If it feels that we’ve zagged from bean-counting every restaurant bill over Venmo to casually trading yeast for cut flowers without any thought to the monetary value of these items, it’s because, well, we have. Bartering hasn’t been this widespread since its days at the elementary-school lunch table. Front Porch Forum, a hyperlocal social network in Vermont and parts of New York that has long been a hub of bartering, has seen an 83 percent increase in new-member sign-ups this year over the same period last year, said Michael Wood-Lewis, who co-founded the site with his wife, Valerie, as a neighborhood listserv back in 2000. While Front Porch Forum is a way for neighbors to connect on a range of things, recently, appeals for swapping eggs for rhubarb or chicken wire for day lily bulbs have increased, Mr. Wood-Lewis said.

Enter the modern barter economy

It’s hard to know exactly how much bartering is happening in the United States, said Brian Burke, an economic anthropologist who teaches in the Sustainable Development Department at Appalachian State University in Boone, N.C. That’s because bartering is set up to be — by design — outside our traditional cash-based economy.

“People often rely on Craigslist offerings as an indicator, though it’s a pretty weak one, especially in a time like this when people are actually creating new online exchanges and mutual aid systems,” he said. In fact, the recent racial justice protests have probably increased the amount of bartering happening throughout the United States, although those participating in it may not have even realized it. Take Ms. Coffman, for example. She wanted to participate in Knoxville’s Black Lives Matter protests, but she didn’t feel safe because of the pandemic. So she sewed masks and gave them to friends who were marching. In essence, she traded her time and expertise as a seamstress for her friends’ willingness to be on the front lines of the protests.

If your introduction to bartering came this spring when your grocery store was low on supplies and you swapped rice for toilet paper, know that bartering doesn’t have to stop now that grocery stores are mostly full again. In fact, Mr. Wood-Lewis said he thinks bartering is a powerful community builder. In a time when many of us have limited contact with the outside world, a friend repaying a small debt feels like a connection tethering us to an otherwise just out-of-reach community. So, as the economy slowly reopens consider continuing with those neighborly trades — who knows how far the recent spate of opening-reversals will go.

Still, the rise in bartering is not emblematic of a total failure of the capitalistic marketplace, according to Frederick Wherry, an economic sociologist at Princeton University in Princeton, N.J. Instead, what’s probably happening is that we’re reaching for any little bit of humanity we can grasp.

“This is a way of being in community with other folks,” Dr. Wherry said.

Consider why you’re bartering

Dr. Burke studied bartering markets in Medellín, Colombia, for his doctoral dissertation. He recalled a telling moment.

One day, someone brought a high-quality gas stove to the market. “They were trying to figure out how they wanted to trade it,” he said. “And everybody had an opinion, right? So, some people said, ‘Oh, you should just trade it for whoever gives you the best deal, or whoever is going to give you the most useful stuff.’”

Others at the market, however, felt that this wasn’t what bartering was about.

“They argued that bartering is not about generating profit,” Dr. Burke said. “It’s about being part of an economic community.” With that in mind, the owners of the stove ended up trading it with a woman who was getting it for her grandmother, who lived in the country and was using an ancient wood stove for cooking.

“So, what they prioritized was not profit, but what they thought of as the most just use of this product,” Dr. Burke said.

Got masks to trade? Consider offering them first to friends deemed essential workers, even if they might not have as much to offer you in return.

Understand our lockdown experiences are not the same

“One of the critiques of these systems is that they become kind of little niche systems for middle-class people who want to experiment with something different,” Dr. Burke said. For people dealing with financial uncertainty, there’s less wiggle room for a bad trade while bartering. “If they’re going to invest time and resources in something like this, they’re going to have confidence that it’s going to pay off,” he said.

Before offering a trade to someone who you know is struggling, consider what may be on the line for them and weigh what you ask for in return carefully. Furthermore, don’t be offended if they decline to barter with you. Even if cash is scarce, buying from a store may feel more secure for them, since they know exactly what they’re getting — and can make returns without hassle.

Our time, however, is the same

Back in 1980, Edgar Cahn, one of the leading advocates of the War on Poverty, came up with timebanking. The premise is simple: Everyone’s time is of equal value. We all get the same number of hours in a day, and so members of a timebank barter in hours. “If it [a volunteer task] takes me two hours, no matter what it is, I get two hours of credit in my time bank,” says Judith Lasker, an emeritus professor of sociology at Lehigh University in Bethlehem, Pa., who wrote a book on timebanking called “Equal Time, Equal Value: Community Currencies and Time Banking in the USA.”

In her research, Dr. Lasker found that participants enjoyed being part of the organization and feeling as if their time was valued. Dr. Lasker thinks that a moment like this — when many people don’t have enough work, and some have too much — could be the perfect moment for time trading. Those out of work can bank their time by offering services like plumbing, cooking, yard work or whatever talent they have. Those juggling full-time parenting and employment can pay those hours back later.

Just gift it

There’s no shortage of research showing that generosity makes us feel good. However, gifts are tricky, because there’s almost always a feeling of needing to reciprocate, says Beth Notar, a professor of anthropology at Trinity College in Hartford, Conn.

Recently, her husband left two cans of semi-hard-to-get beer on a neighbor’s doorstep. A few days later, a single can of an even rarer beer arrived on their doorstep. “Our neighbor met my husband’s gift ‘challenge’ so to speak, and maybe even upped the bar,” she said.

Furthermore, whether you realize it or not, sometimes we use gifts to establish social status. If you do want to give a gift, in these strange and hard times, the kind gift giver will say upfront that no reciprocity — not even a thank-you note — is needed, though don’t be surprised if your friend finds a way to reciprocate anyway.

Be kind if things don’t work out

If you barter with something now for something promised in the future, that agreement may fall through. Things happen and people are going to be particularly overwhelmed — both financially and emotionally — by this crisis for quite some time, Dr. Wherry said.

And when it comes to getting a debt repaid, “sometimes kindness can be the quickest route to repayment,” Dr. Wherry added. “If you feel like you’re being investigated, all the walls go up,” he said. But when someone shows faith in your ability to get out of the mess you’re in, that helps. “It’s like, this person has faith in me, and I’m not going to let them down,” Dr. Wherry said. Finally, consider just letting the barter be a gift.

“Keep in mind that letting things go means that you have an informal credit,” said Dr. Wherry, adding, not only will you be building good will for the future, but you’ll also feel good about having the ability to let things go.