The Paper Clip Challenge

Earlier this month I started a class on starting or growing a business, partly for myself and partly to see what Blueberry Girl and KOTPE would be learning and how I might support them.  One of our first assignments was incredibly eye-opening, and I think if I never learned another thing, this one lesson from the first class makes it all worthwhile.

The Paper Clip Challenge serves two functions.  First, it moves you out of your comfort zone and prompts you to talk to people.  Secondly, it teaches a little about bartering.  We made some good trades and some not so good, and it was interesting to learn from each other’s experiences.

The Paper Clip Challenge gets its name from, you guessed it, the paper clip, which is the suggested item to begin the bartering adventure. 

KOTPE began with his paper clip, and perhaps because he esteemed it of little value, traded it to his wife for a single Barbie shoe.  While he did accomplish his first trade, no one else wanted to trade with him.  So that was a bummer for him.

We have a dearth of paper clips at our house.  I needed one the previous week so that Aaron could perform some kind of functionality test on the freeze dryer, and it took forever to find one then.  So rather than spending an hour looking for another paper clip, I elected to begin my challenge with a single starlight peppermint, the kind that restaurants give out after your dinner.  I traded that to Blueberry Girl for a brand new bottle of nail polish that originally retailed for $10, but had been discounted to $1 when she bought it.  But she had decided that she didn’t like the color, so she was happy to trade it away.  I then traded that nail polish to Ellie for a brand new bottle of Liquid Bandage. 

I thought that was a screaming deal, but then I had difficulties getting my next trade.  Cowboy refused to trade away any of the food storage that he and Ellie had just received as their wedding gift and which was still occupying our entryway.  Not for one of the five 1-pound bricks of instant yeast.  He vastly prefers sourdough, and I pointed out that the yeast would need to be stored in their likely very small apartment-sized fridge freezer.  No go.  Ugh.  So I moved on.

I needed something from my husband that would be an upgrade I could then trade to KOTPE or Cowboy.  I suggested he must have some tools in the garage that he no longer needed.  You’d have thought I was asking for a kidney.  He finally begrudgingly yielded a package of blueberry banana trail mix that he had just picked up at the pharmacy, with the promise that I would buy some for him the next time I stopped in there.  Cowboy finally agreed to cough up a quart jar of twelve-year-old commercially dehydrated carrots for the trail mix.  But then he and Ellie forgot and packed up all their food to take to their future apartment.  So it was back to the drawing board.

KOTPE offered a ball of cotton garden twine in exchange for the trail mix, not quite the upgrade I was hoping for, but probably the best I was going to do with a guy who got burned with a Barbie shoe earlier in the week. 

Blueberry Girl also started with a starlight mint and traded that to a coworker for an almost new box of 24 crayons made in China.  She then traded that to her sister-in-law for a package of thank-you notes.   

I posted an article last year about a gentleman who built his family’s wealth during the Depression and post-WWII with his own paper clip challenge, using eggs and chickens as his beginning currency.  What stood out to me from the trades he made and which his grandson shared with the acquaintances on that internet forum, was that his grandfather always had the better end of the deal. 

What I didn’t pick up on was more along the lines of “one man’s trash is another man’s treasure.” 

And so I got to thinking about my food storage and items that I would gladly trade away, things that might have value to others, but that I might currently regard as highly as a paper clip:

Butter powder.  I think I still have two cases of this.  When I learned that coconut oil makes an almost perfect butter substitute, I was ready to dump the butter powder.  But I didn’t, hoping some practical was of using it would come up.  I eventually realized that it can be used to make Magic Mix. 

Rancid oil can be used to make oil lamps.

Orange Jell-o.  It was 5 or 10 cents per large box, so I bought a lot. 

Old beans or powdered milk. 

Those canned peaches from the Eisenhower administration. 

Granulated sugar from sugar beets.  I had quit buying this about 15 years ago, opting just for pure cane sugar for my family.  But it’s gotten so expensive!  Fortunately, we eat a whole lot less of it now, but still.  So Aaron and I have started buying sugar beet sugar again, ostensibly just for feeding the myriad of hummingbirds that spend the summers in our area. 

I recall hearing the account related by Ezra Taft Benson, secretary of Agriculture during the Eisenhower administration, of a German woman left destitute from the ravages of WWII.  He brought oranges or tangerines for the people he was speaking to.  And she traded her orange, her precious orange, away for a spool of thread to mend her threadbare clothes. 

Of course, we strive to prepare well so that when the collapse happens, we aren’t forced into difficult decisions or circumstances.  It’s a useful exercise to practice your own paper clip challenge with family and friends.  You might be surprised at the trades they make, now and in the future.  And while we don't want to be the kind of people that take advantage of another's ignorance or misfortune (it's one of the reasons our society is so messed up), it's important to keep in mind that people have different tastes or uses for items we might consider worthless. 

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