I used to collect hockey cards when I was younger and would trade duplicate copies I had for cards I didn’t have.
I thought it was a fair exchange at the time because I wasn’t interested in the monetary value of the cards and just wanted a complete set.
Describe a barter transaction that you’ve been a part either as a child or adult.
List the two items in the barter transaction and, looking back, did you think it was a fair exchange and why?
I remember as a child trading Magic the Gathering cards and Pokémon cards with the neighborhood kids. I can’t remember all the trades but one that most sticks out is I traded nearly 50 cards for an Snow Dragon. I Really felt like I made out in the deal because I had hardly any attack cards. As a kid those are the cards everyone wants anyways.
For me, before I can even talk about trading pokemon cards when I came to europe at the age of 14, I have to go way back when I was younger in my country of origin back in Africa.
We had days when we had nothing to eat, no money to buy stuff, so what I did with my cousin… we entered the farm of our neighbour, climbs the guava tree and harvested some ripe guava, only to go and trade with some bread and beans with our friends in school. We sold some, and traded others for other goods. I think is was good trade, with the neighbour, because we kept watch of his harm (without him asking us to :p) and with the guys in school, definitely a win win, because we needed what they had and the loved the juicy ripe guava fruits we brought from home. Side note, our home was one of the first in a forest… so the fruits where very juicy.
As kids at school we enjoyed the game of marbles in the playground. There were basically two sizes - the larger ones being called a ‘Tom bowler’. One pristine Tom Bowler (i.e.without chipped surface!) was typically exchanged for three or four smaller marbles depending on the perceived quality and coloring of the smaller marbles. Kids would also exchange like sized marbles where one was considered to have visual or physical qualities worth sacrificing some of one’s own for. It was a case of market forces prevailing because everyone had a fairly aligned sense of which marbles were the rarest or which ones had the best patterns etc. Everyone was happy with this kind of daily playground commerce and game fun!
When I was young, I trade dragon ball card against others with my friends, for me the valor was collectionnable a litle bit like NFT in this moment, I classified by design characters, premium, and to my subjectif sentiment about graphique style and my favorite characters in the serie. Hear it’s the same differents Item, but when I’m bored, or when I desire other thing more just another card I can trade against toys or I have doble or no interest just like candy. All dépend of my desir and my sentiment more the attribued current value if there is a rating for that like Pokemon or Magic card.
My last barter was I cut down my neighbors dead tree and he let me use his drum set for my all day live music party. It was absolutely worth it not to have to break down drum sets for each band that played that day, and he did not have to hire someone to remove a tree.
I have a vague memory of trading ‘A-Team’ collectable stickers, in primary school…
At the military it was common to trade foods from the lunchbags, when training outside. E.g. an apple and some bread for canned meat. Usually, everyone felt like it was a good trade, since you give away, what you feel you have too much of, and receive what you want more of.
I guess l should be about 8yrs old when it all happened. We wanted to play football with a rival team; but John who owns a football does not really know how to play. We were forced to include him in our team so that we can use his football to play our match. In the end, we lost the competition.
We wanted to play a match with our rivals. John who is not a good player wanted to play in our team. So we needed a football badly and John whom we all know cannot play very well wanted to join our team. We compromised to add John to our team and he lent us his football to play with. It was a sort of trade by barter. The exchange was John’s football. So there were needs and a means of exchange. I am convinced it was not a good transaction because we lost the match. I am sure we could have won if we played with our best team.
When I was a child I liked to trade Pokemon cards with other students who did the same thing. I had a holographic Charizard (super rare) and I made a trade for a Rhydon card because it was my favorite pokemon (still my favorite). In terms of monetary value it was a really bad trade. . `
As a young child at school we used to trade/barter AFL (Australian Rules football) cards with each other from chewing gum packets.
I was always happy with the trades because I received what I wanted and so did the other.
I remember back even in high school we would barter for different snacks when we didn’t have cash on us. I’d always trade chips and nuts for the fresh cookies my high school made xD it’d depend on how i demand my chips would be on any given day. It was an extremely volatile barter system 
As a kid I would go to Gamestop every few weeks and trade in my old PS2 games for new PS2 games. For the time being, it was worth it. Saved my parents a lot of money.
When I was little I used to trade pokemon cards with friends. Personally I would trade cards I had doubles of, so that I could reap all the benefits while losing the least intrinsically valued cards. I had some rare doubles also so I was able to trade for multiple cards.
Describe a barter transaction that you’ve been a part either as a child or adult.
Last Saturday I started cleaning my 55 Gallon aquarium which is a full aquascape underwater forest and I had just received the new plant cover for the bonsai trees that I had been waiting for a week to receive because of lock down not knowing if they would have survived in the post because it should have only taken a day to arrive.
Nevertheless, this meant I had to prepare this very fine phoenix moss and de-algae every branch of the 3 big bonsai trees. Not only did I have to remove all of the moss from its wire mesh storage grates. I had to tweezer hundreds of very fine moss threads in between the bonsai tree branches and tie everything down very carefully with fine fishing line otherwise it would have just floated off the trees when I filled the tank up.
This procedure I calculated from experience was to take me a minimum of 12 hours from start to finish with no breaks whatsoever during the process. Therefore, not only does it take a lot of patience but also a lot of discipline to stick at it until completion because the nitrifying bacteria in the fish filter start dying immediately once the pumps is turned off which is needed to maintain the ecosystem.
The rugby lions’ game was on at 11pm my time the same day so I had a deadline and therefore I anticipated to start at 10 am and finish at 10 pm with an hour to clean up, shower and be able to watch the game. So I got to work exactly at 10am.
Here’s where the barter comes into play!
It was 10 pm as predicted, I had just completed the mission on time in terms of doing the aqua scaping, filling the aquarium and having just turned on the pump. At that moment thinking I’ve smashed it and have the hour to get everything squared away for the game.
All of a sudden out of nowhere the only message I’ve received all day is from my friend requesting me to answer some random crypto questions with no context whatsoever that he had received on one of he’s paid groups (The War Room) he belongs to which he had been telling me about prior during the week.
Apparently, this group is intense business-like minded millionaires that brain storm ideas, so the questions were important to him and needed immediate answering to prevent himself looking like a fool.
However not only is this a new group for him, he’s not into crypto such as I am and whether he was too lazy to do the research or to intoxicated or simply didn’t know how to answer the questions he turned to me at 10 PM after my solid grind to harass me to answer these questions on 8 crypto tokens.
And having had a few drinks his remark was, it will only take you 5 mins come on do it please. I told him no I’ve been busy all day and it was more like an hour’s task due to needing to do some research to answer the questions.
Well as you can guess being drunk, he wouldn’t let up and out came, Ill pay you $1000 to answer the questions just do it.
This is where my time is valuable and I still declined knowing I could simply make $1000 for answering a few questions that would take me an hour at most.
He then said come on mate, I know you can do it, I’ll pay you $2000 dollars, just do it. At this point I told him he is taking the piss and I got annoyed with him which then resulted in his final barter of just do it mate and name your price!
At that moment I wasn’t going to take advantage of my friend however of course I’d be an absolute fool to turn down $2000 which was he’s last realistic offer I felt reasonable for the inconvenience he was causing me for 1 hours work and got to it.
It took me exactly 1 hour to complete the task and I sent him the answers and sent him my wallet address where he paid me the $2000 the following day.
I bet he regretted those beers in t e morning and I ended up getting paid $2000 to clean my aquarium, and still got to watch the game. Winner-winner chicken dinner.
Moral of the story “time is money”
Item one was my valuable time for item two being the answers to his cryptocurrency questions.
Yes, I felt personally it was a fair exchange because he had to eliminate the coincidence of wants scenario with me in order to give me a fair price for my time that I felt worth it rather than him stating the value he was willing to pay. He may have regretted the value though from his side in the morning having been intoxicated during the barter, lol, but he never said anything of the sorts just paid as promised in the end.
In the '90’s, my partner, ran a boat to the reef, we would barter with local restaurant owners, a trip to the reef, for a meal at the restaurant. Absolutely felt it was a fair exchange, as everyone was happy with what they got.
Traded tickets from game machines for a prize. Looking back I already pay the game machine so basically I’m paying cash for a prize that costs less than what I payed for it. Very clever.
Probably even worse trading my time and sweat for money. Don’t get me wrong I like working but my value in the market is not as much as I would like it to be but only I can sort that out. Funny how it’s like 1 of your hour is worth x amount.
We used to trade cards during school breaks. The cards were valued and prices negotiated based on their relative scarcity. I think it was pretty fair, because a) total supply of cards was limited b) introducing new cards into the " class room economy" required buying them somewhere for real money c) they maintained value over time (at least for a few months in that case).
We used to trade marbles. I can not remember all of the names, but based on the perceived rarity of each type of marble would determine the outcome of the trade (i.e. 5 cats eyes for a creamy, or 5 creamy’s for a steely, etc.). The trades seemed fair at the time likely because of the bragging rights or because you scored that giant steely for your “Crown Royal” bag full of cats eyes.
One barter exchange that I was part of included multiple exchanges of Pokemon cards for different combinations of other pokemon cards. I went for scarcity while others went for quantity. I thought I killed it actuallly, but it was close to fair.