I’ll Do Your Mortgage For Millet, Or a Website
When I was a young kid in the 1970s, my mom ran a retail clothing store that shared a back alley with a nearby hippie food co-op. They would illegally use her designated dumpster when theirs got full, causing her collection bills to rise — only a nominal rise, but the hippie presumptuousness was highly annoying, and every penny counted during that extreme inflationary era. Eventually they worked out a deal: in exchange for them using her extra dumpster capacity, she would receive store credit. Trouble is the store carried food that 8-10 year-olds don’t care about. Tofu products. Bland vegetables. And unsweetened cereal, the nastiest of which was millet.
To this day I am haunted by force feeding myself millet for more than two years. But that’s what people had to do. Now it seems we’re returning to that era. Today the Wall Street Journal ran a piece on small business bartering that begins like this:
Teia Henderson, a self-employed accountant in Cary, N.C., says there has been less demand for her services lately amid a sputtering economy. So rather than plunk down cash for new bunk beds for her children, she posted an online ad offering to exchange accounting services for a set. “It’s not about charging clients money,” says the 35-year-old Ms. Henderson. “It’s about the end product — getting the bunk beds.” This method of doing business also helps her add to her client list. She now does the books for a contractor, for example, who in exchange installed a patio in her backyard.
The article talks about how people are doing cash-free barters for things like wedding services, tombstones, breast augmentation and Botox treatments. Only it’s more than a handshake now. The WSJ says barter websites like U-Exchange, BarterYourServices.com and Barter Bucks are growing fast, and that “Craigslist also has seen its monthly ‘barter’ postings across all cities double to 121,173 in April, up from 63,624 in April 2007.”
When we’ve seen inflation rising all year and 438,000 jobs lost through June (and 404,000 new jobless claims just filed), it doesn’t surprise me that cash-strapped small business owners with something to offer are looking for alternatives.
The story jogged my memory and I called my mom to fact check the co-op barter deal. She reminded me that she also traded store credit for family haircuts, piano lessons for me and my sister, exercise classes, ongoing trades with the hardware store, chiropractic treatments, and of course millet.
I love this barter story. I got credit for calling my mom. I got a good story of my own out of it. And I support the trend for small business owners. It reminded me that I grew up around bartering, and that much of The Basis Point website was built in exchange for my lending services and advice. So it gives me confidence in a tough economy knowing that I can do mortgages for cereal to feed my kid-on-the-way if things get really bad. But no millet. Damn that hippie food.