As a kid we would exchange candy and food for supplies if someone was in need of a some kind of school supply. So if they needed to use some markers or something they’d give us some or all of their lunch they brought from home. It was fair as in those moments we each valued what the other person had more that what we gave up.
I remember when i was young we were trading football cards, and the most valuable footballer had a different value compared with normal ones…
I cant seem to remember a barter transaction I was apart of as a child or even adult as whenever I was offered a barter trade as a child, I never found it to be fair so I would always decline and I was never one to really ever offer a barter trade to anyone either. The closest thing I can think of is when playing a video game and bartering items inside that game server. Therefore if I wanted a specific item or thing built for me in minecraft, I would trade Items I had on me for it and I always found those trades to be fair to me.
When I was a kid, I trade playing cards for marbles. Some kids like to play marbles and some like cards. We already have an agreement on how many playing cards to trade for certain marbles. So if you want to switch playing from cards to marbles or vice versa, just trade with your friends. It was fun and fair because everyone agreed with the trade.
As a teenager/young adult I was a summer camp counselor at a Marxist work camp. The barter was labor & time for money maybe $200 per two weeks work. All summer we worked 12 hour days, alone with up to ten children per adult counselor without breaks some summers we had no days off. Other regular camp counselors played tennis, went horseback riding, etc. had breaks and days off with two/three counselors per group. They got paid richly. Ugh.
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A barter transaction I would often have as a kid was trading different types of Cards, Basketball, yu-gi-oh and others for items that I wanted. One instance of this was trading a Kobe Bryant card for some old coins that a buddy of mine had. I think that it was a fair trade, but now looking back it might have not been a good deal for me. Not sure If I traded a rare card or a common. It hard to really say if it was fair, but as a kid it sure did seem fair.
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When I lived in the beautiful beach of Huatulco (here in Mexico) I exchanged a camping kit that included things like a tent, chairs, sleeping bags, pillows, a lantern, etc. for an entire month of stay with my AirBnB host. It was a fair transaction because the cost of lodging was about the same of what I payed for the kit (it was brand new and it was never used).
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I have memories of trading AFL Australian Rules Football cards of the star players, it could go way beyond just swapping of say six average or new players for one star to doing someones chores for a week [hard labour lol] because my mate had got lucky when he bought his gum and had two or three of the one i wanted, As an adult i get to swap my art for trade like a carpenters work for a week or a project or a concreter to put down a slab, recently i swapped one of my paintings for a car for my daughter.
I did think my trades as a child were fair at the time also as an adult because both parties were happy and felt like winners everybody got what they wanted.
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I sold Pokemon cards fore mooney, also one time I collected pine cones from a tree and tried to sell, it didn’t work.
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I used to trade baseball cards. When I was around 9 or 10 years old thought I got one over on a neighbor kid as I traded a football card for an Alan Trammell rookie card. Baseball cards were far more valuable than football cards and I thought I was a genius for ripping this poor kid off. Ironically the football card I traded away was a Joe Montana rookie card. That Montana card became worth many $1,000’s of dollars in mint condition while the Trammell card I got could be used for a drink coaster. Karma I suppose.
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Purchased a Ken Griffy Jr rookie card for $30 as a kid and then later sold for $70. Was happy at the time but later it was worth much more and I wished i had held longer.
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I remember trading (barter transaction) comics, kites and candies when kid. Both were satisfied and happy with the exchange.
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I remember trading Pokemon cards and Panini stickers in school. The exchange rate was not always 1:1 - sometimes it was difficult to determine a value.
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We used to trade marbles. The least valued was made of concrete, glass about ten times as valuable. Glass even came in different sizes. The most valuable came from ballbearings the biggest we traded was about 40mm across. I did not trade my brass marble, as nobody got a similar it was my precious.
I do not know if this really is a kind of barter trade as it is just sort of exchange of objects with the same use. However the exchange was fair in the childish way, but when we grew older and found the value of marbles in cash, the fun was gone.
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As a child, I used to exchange candy for different candy with my friends. For example, maybe I would give my friend my snickers bar, if she gave me her kitkat bar. I liked the kitkat bars better than snickers, and she was the opposite. So it was equal for both of us.
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When I was a kid we used to play marbles. We used to trade them between the neighborhood quite a bit. The “steely” were the best which were just ball bearings but they were heavy and shinny! It took a handful of regular cat eye marbles to get a decent size steely!
The annual Halloween candy trade! lol
a barter tranaction i remeber for washing my fathers car i get a ice cream.
As a young adult in my twenties we would barter work time. My friends and I were at the point we were all buying fixer upper properties. We would trade hours worked at each others houses or properties. The transactions were not always equal because the physical difficulty of the work varied greatly, but we would guesstimate the physical difficulty or worth of the time and try to adjust it to be fair.
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One of the things I remember is back in primary school. We used to trade in different type of trading cards. Be it Pokémon, Yu-Gi-Oh or any other major card brand. It could be that we traded within the same brand/type or between different ones. And looking back, I think we traded fairly, beside from the school bullies maybe. Since we based the value of the trade on how much we liked a particular card and what we were willing to give away, instead of the value it might have online.
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