With the U.S. treasury hell bent on printing as much money as possible, and the airwaves rife with news of the impending apocalypse, we at Pazzo decided to take action. Starting Thursday October 2nd, every Thursday afternoon will be Barter Thursdays at Pazzo Books. Initially we’ll be accepting barter items from 1-3 every Thursday afternoon (bartering is better after lunch – we don’t want any low blood sugar blow ups) but we hope to expand this slowly. Ideally we’ll be going gangbusters by the time the U.S. financial system actually does collapse and we’ll barely notice the transition off of currency entirely.
Here’s a short list of items that you might want to swap for books:
Padded envelopes
Canned foods (corned beef hash, pigeon peas, red beans are all favorites)
Salt cod
Records (blues, hip-hop, jazz and indie rock are all worth a try)
Diapers (year and a half size)
Gasoline
Coffee (espresso preferred)
Interesting posters (preferably foreign – esp. Eastern European)
We’ll take anything especially interesting be it a matchbook, a paperweight or a hat
We’ll be adding to this regularly and eventually we hope to have an active swap system in place where we can take anything we have a market for elsewhere. Note to the IRS – we fully intend to comply with all barter laws – at least until you cease to exist.
Studies have shown that the inability of chimpanzees to make intelligent bartering decisions is what prevented them from taking over the world, so we don’t want to backslide now that the chips are down. If I have anything to say about it, the next great species on planet earth after the fall will be Homo sapiens sapiens
Online bartering sites like swaptree have already popped up (we’re testing it out right how and will report back) but it’s just too likely that any crisis will take the internet with it – we need a real world solution.
We’re quite serious about this and to demonstrate the approaching worthlessness of the greenback, I give you the chart of the value of gold:
The outrageous spike there at the end is pretty scary. There was one like it in 1980 (Iran crisis, oil crisis, Russian problems, Japan taking over the world economy – seems eerily familiar), and though we’re all still here, I’m not taking any chances.
What’s interesting is that palladium, a scarce but more industrial rare metal hasn’t run up at all.
That spike around the millennium was probably due to perceived demand for high tech products, but you notice there’s no increase in value recently. Once the financial system collapses and we’re all living in caves there will be little demand for palladium – note how it has actually tanked as the extent of the financial crisis has become clear (this despite the fact that Iron Man uses it in the mini cold fusion reactor that powers his suit. How this didn’t send the price soaring is a mystery).
Enough doom and gloom! Let’s start bartering – every Thursday from 1-3!
Have you guys walked over to the Trading Post on Park Street? They’ve been bartering stuff for years.
This is a fabulous idea. Barter is the way thing are going to go, for sure.
The Trading Post is all junk, though. Much better to barter for books. Do we have to barter with Pazzo directly, or can we barter with other customers?
Bartering with other customers, second level trades (trading for a book to trade with another trader – trading with another trader to trade for a book), etc, are all encouraged. Well, we don’t really encourage etc, per se.
You guys collect toasters, right?
Definitely. Originally the toasters were just going to be part of my Social and Cultural History of Toast but now I’ve got the toaster bug. I need one of those fireplace toasters, in particular.
Cool blog. I think I’ll check you guys out from time to time!