Spent 3 months designing a local barter ledger system and finally saw my neighbor trade 6 eggs for a lawn mow

Everyone I talk to keeps saying barter can't work at scale because of the 'double coincidence of wants' problem, but I proved them wrong last Tuesday when Mrs. Gable took the eggs I offered for cutting her grass and then traded those eggs to the guy fixing her fence, so how do we get more towns to try this without waiting for the dollar to totally crash?

3 comments

3 Comments

lewis.mila26d agoMost Upvoted

@ray_williams is basically running a shadow economy from his front yard with that whiteboard, which is exactly how these things spread like a weird, neighborly virus. Now Mrs. Gable is the town's accidental egg broker, and before you know it she'll have a ledger and a clipboard and start charging a handling fee. My neighbor tried something similar but all he got was someone offering him a half-eaten bag of chips for trimming their hedges, so your mileage may vary depending on who's knocking. Just don't let your barter system get too complicated or you'll end up needing an accountant just to figure out who owes who a haircut.

ray_williams26d ago

...and that's exactly how it starts to work once people see it happen in front of them. I did something similar in my neighborhood last year, started with just three families trading garden veggies for babysitting. The trick is you don't try to get everyone on board at once, you just keep doing it yourself and let people watch. Mrs. Gable is your proof of concept now, she'll tell her friend and that friend will tell someone else. What worked for me was putting a simple whiteboard in my front yard with what I had to offer and what I needed, then people started walking by and knocking on my door. Got to the point where the guy two streets over traded me a used pressure washer for fixing his laptop. Just keep it small and local, let the network grow natural.

the_sam26d ago

Oh come ON with this "natural growth" stuff ray_williams. You say you started with three families and it snowballed, but what about the ACTUAL problems nobody wants to admit? Mrs. Gable might be your egg broker today, but what happens when someone trades her a dozen eggs that are two days old and she doesn't notice until after she's already promised them to the fence guy? There's no quality control, no refunds, nobody to complain to except each other. I know firsthand how fast neighborly goodwill crumbles when someone feels cheated. And that whiteboard in your yard? Cute until a kid writes "free lawn mower" on it as a joke and you've got four angry dudes on your doorstep wanting to know where their mower is. The double coincidence thing isn't just some textbook theory, it's real. I watched my sister's neighborhood try this and within a month people were fighting over whether fixing a leaky faucet was worth two loaves of bread or three.