Barter Club Members Featured in Readers Digest

Swap Nation: Why Bartering Is Making A Comeback
September 2009

Ron Trejo's advertising agency caters to small companies around Lake Tahoe and Sacramento, and when they cut their budgets, he feels it fast. But the economic downturn that hit his business hard didn't stop him from taking his wife on a luxurious weekend getaway to Monterey last spring: three days in a cottage at Pacific Grove's tony Sea Breeze Inn. The Trejos shopped on Monterey's historic Cannery Row and cruised the coast in a rented 1968 Cadillac convertible, winding up in a romantic restaurant on the cliffs of Big Sur.

Foolish? No. The Trejos did it all for $350 by employing one of the oldest–and newest–tricks in the book: bartering. "The best thing about bartering," Ron says, "is it allows people to do things they couldn't afford to do normally."

But for Ron Trejo and a growing number of other creative consumers, bartering isn't only about getting a piece of the good life. In his downtime, Trejo has done ad work in exchange for relatively basic things like new tires and carpet cleaning.

Business is booming in the barter economy. On craigslist, the classified advertising web site, requests for bartered goods and services were up 125 percent in the past year, making it one of the site's most popular categories. Recent posts include "dining chairs for computer," "litigation services for reliable van," and "my BlackBerry for your digital camera." At u-exchange.com, the number of members posting goods for trade has almost doubled over the ast year, to over 64,000, including more than 16,000 who joined in the first half of 2009 alone.

Established trading networks like Lake Tahoe region's Barter Club, which Trejo belongs to, are resurging too. Members receive a kind of alternative currency based on the retail dollar value of what they have to trade; they can spend those credits with anyone else who participates.

Rick Tracewell, a DJ and web site designer, uses the club to treat his big family–he has five kids ranging from 4 to 16–to Italian and sushi dinners. "Mony is always tight," Tracewell says. "To be able to go out to a nice restaurant with them is really awesome."

In addition to the Tahoe club, Trejo belongs to a large regional barter network called ITEX, which he tapped to find merchants in the Monterey area willing to supply his hotel stay, restaurant meals, and rental car.

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