Bartering
What Is Bartering?
Bartering is exchanging goods or services you can offer with another party, in exchange for goods or services they can offer, without using a medium of exchange i.e. currency or money. It’s the oldest form of commerce.
What Is An Example Of Bartering?
It could be a simple as giving your neighbour some excess eggs from your chickens, in return for a jar of preserves made from their fruit trees.
A classic example is to offer manual work in exchange for a meal. For example doing some gardening in return for some home cooked food.
Kids might swap a Prime keychain they have two of for one they haven’t collected yet.
What Is The Difference Between Bartering And Buying?
Buying goods or services involves exchanging money for them, either electronically or with notes and coins.
Fun fact. Early coins were actually worth something, due to the high level of precious metals used in their production. Modern coins are effectively worthless tokens which simply represent the idea of value.
Bartering involves exchanging a good / service you can offer for a good / service another party can offer. No money or cash is involved.
Why Is Bartering No Longer Used?
If everyone can agree on a universal and easy to divide medium to trade with, say cash in the form of coins and notes, buying items with that medium is easier than constantly bartering.
The only question is what an item is priced at. Let’s take eggs and canned soup as an example.
Is a can of soup worth one egg or two eggs? It depends what the can of soup is worth to party A and what the eggs are worth to party B.
It also depends on how many other parties have cans of soup or eggs on offer locally. This is called supply and demand. If there are loads of eggs around the price of an egg drops and if there is only a few cans of soup around, the price of canned soup goes up.
If everyone has cash to buy items with and everyone knows an egg is generally acknowledged to cost 20p - 30p then trade becomes super easy for seller and buyers.
It also becomes spread over a much larger area. If £2.40 can buy you a dozen eggs in your town, it can also buy you a dozen eggs from the next town.
How To Barter
Bartering is a negotiation to exchange something for something else, but here’s the rub. Each party thinks their item is worth more than the other party’s item.
Why give away two cans of soup for two eggs when one can should be enough?
Why give away two eggs for one can of soup when one might be enough?
Both parties have an interest in some sort of exchange otherwise they wouldn’t start bartering in the first place, so a negotiation to establish exactly what is exchanged has to take place.
This is called haggling or how to haggle. On the premise a trade is likely, it’s simply ironing out the specifics of the trade.
This usually sees both parties overstate their position, giving them both room to ratchet down as needed to ensure a successful exchange.
Haggling techniques:
Classic haggling: Start at 80% 20%, then 60% 40%, then 50% 50% etc.
Hold your ground: Boldly reiterate your position on why your item is worth what you think it is
Break the deadlock: Add in a small “sweetener” to nudge the trade over the line e.g. a small sachet of sauce or seasoning
Walk away: Highlight another source offering the same item and threaten to take your business there instead
If you have ever played the card game Poker for fun, it’s basically the same concept.
What Items Are Good To Barter With After SHTF?
The list is almost infinite but a few good examples to think about are:
Bottled water
Toilet paper
Salt
Soap
Batteries
Tobacco
Alcohol
Tea / coffee
Sugar
Honey
Long shelf life foods like pasta / rice / beans
Cooking oil
Eggs
Vegetables
Feminine hygiene products (tampons and sanitary pads)
Always have some backup cash on you in case of an emergency
When prepping, put a few extra items aside that are highly barterable