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SAN MATEO, CALIFORNIA —
Laid off in December, with two children to feed, Tammie Bryant flung an ad
online, hoping for a few bites.
"Mom Bartering for it all/Life," she typed. "We were just not
making it," said Bryant, 37. "I had to get creative and think, what
can I do?"
Her offer: Just about anything — cooking, accounting, painting, personal
shopping, Internet research, taxes, a kindly ear — in trade for clothes
for the kids, groceries, meat. "I traded haircuts for groceries. I
baby-sat a lady's cat and dog in my house for two weeks over the Christmas
holidays. I'm doing everything," said Bryant, who was an executive
assistant for more than a decade. "I would shovel crap at this moment,
I don't care. I need to get the bills paid."
With the sickly economy and rampant layoffs idling workers and some
businesses, the ranks of those now turning to cashless commerce, with
varied levels of sophistication and success, is on the rise in the Bay
Area and beyond.
Witness the hundreds of daily barter pleas on Craigslist: windshield
repair for hair extensions; divorce strategies for a Tahoe weekend cabin;
bookkeeping for driving lessons.
Watch as Bay Area progressives gather for meetings at cafes and pizza
joints, aiming to create a local currency for labor and food, a substitute
for the mightily dwindling dollar.
See membership swell in barter networks such as BizXchange, where firms
buy and sell anything from private school tuition
to plastic surgery to advertising, staying
busy or shedding inventory while using "BizX dollars" to hold onto cash.
With about 500 Bay Area members, BizXchange claims a 40 percent rise in
new membership in December compared with a year earlier, and it projects
80 percent growth this year.
"It's always been good. It's even better now, more helpful to keep the
precious cash we have," said Paul Parker, president of Active Electric
in Concord. He was busy this week hooking up a paper cutter at a
Pleasanton copy shop for BizX credit that he uses barter credits for
dental coverage for his employees, accounting, tax services — whatever
lowers overhead. "I think of it as a different kind of money, but it's
not cash you can put in your pocket."
In better days, many members treated the
barter credits as "mad money" for luxury hotels, jewelry, holiday parties
and other perks, said Chris Haddawy, chief operating officer for
BizXchange. "Now it's printing, signage, advertising. The core business
expenses are what people are calling in for," he said. |
Straight,
one-on-one barter (contra) may be the first form of commerce, but barter
exchanges have become a $12 billion industry by offering a wider market,
said Ron Whitney, executive director of the International Reciprocal Trade
Association. "In the Depression, people lost faith in financial
institutions and you're starting to see that again," he said. "Where
do you migrate to? A network of trust. Barter exchanges are networks of
trust."
Some Depression-era school districts and local manufacturers issued scrip
to sustain local economies as banks shut down and cash withered. Now, an
upstart group called Bay Area Community Exchange, keen on ideals of a
sustainable local economy, is trying to create some kind of new barter
currency here. One model, in Ithaca, New York, features "Ithaca Hours," a
currency designed to strengthen the local economy.
"People are realizing the system is really failing and we need to
create a new system," said organizer Heather Young, of San Francisco.
"I've been talking about this for years. Only now are people really,
really interested."
Such currencies amount to a kind of local protectionist policy, said
Martha Olney, an adjunct professor of economics and economic history at UC
Berkeley. As for barter, conditions in the Depression were far different,
with banks closing and cash literally running short, Olney said. Now,
straight barter makes little economic sense except for those looking to
avoid reporting it to Uncle Sam, she said.
"What's really funny about it is, if I'm going to barter two hours of
my services to you, and you're going to give me I-don't-know-what, what we
could do is you could pay me $200 and I could pay you $200 to buy the
thing from you," said Olney.
When Jesse Larson of Oakley found house-painting work dry up last summer,
he began posting ads offering to paint in trade for ... so far, a Range
Rover, a watch, wine, and soon, he hopes, frequent flier miles to get him
to his girlfriend in Brazil. "People are so skeptical now" about
the economy, Larson said. "Even if they have money, they don't want to
pay it. With miles, that's one of the things people are really lax about."
Some barterers have different ideas of a fair transaction, as Tammie
Bryant quickly learned. One asked her to clean a bathroom for a package of
hot dogs. "I get a lot of perverts. One guy offered handyman service.
He told me he wanted a groin massage. He said he had a groin injury,"
she said. "I said, 'I think I'll have to pass on that one. Have a good
day.'" |
