Maybe it's a sign of the times or maybe it's because bargain-hunting is as ancient as shopping itself, but old-fashioned ideas are finding their way back into Metro Detroit's economy -with a twist. Forward-thinking businesses, mostly aided by the Internet, are seeing renewed interest in the age-old practices of trading, bartering and gifting.
Whether it's Metro Trading Association, TradeFirst.com, Architectural Salvage Warehouse of Detroit or web-based communities like Craigslist and Freecycle.org, there's new cultural movement based on exchange that is equal parts idealistic and practical.
And for all its trendiness, it's also a wordy, jargon-heavy topic. But of all the terms you're likely to hear batted around - sustainability, green economics, e-commerce - "fondue" is not likely to be one of them.
That is, unless you're talking to Jennifer Oswald.
"I don't think it's a fresh and new idea," Oswald says, discussing the whirlwind of practical-minded marketplaces happening on dot orgs like Craigslist and Freecycle. "I grew up seeing my parents do it. It's just that the Internet has made it more popular." She pauses for a minute, then blurts, "It's like fondue. Fondue is new, right?
Okay."
Oswald makes a good point. The concept of exchange might be making a comeback, but it's been a part of American culture as far back as the gifting customs of Native American tribes, and has existed globally for thousands of years. So fondue, it turns out, is actually a perfect analogy.
On the surface, there is little to link the Swiss cooking craze, first trendy in the States in the mid '60s and recently in vogue again, to these new models of connectivity and environmentally-concious business practice. But fondue is not as new as we think and can be traced back to the freaking
Illiad. Like exchange culture, heated cheese dishes are just an old idea given a fresh coat of paint.
From each according to his junkOswald is talking to me because I saw her Curb Alert on
Craigslist - "Metalscape, corner of 10 Mile & McDowell" - and e-mailed her to ask if we could set up an interview. (Curb Alerts, like the name implies, are simply notifications of cool stuff seen left on sidewalks and, unlike most of the thousands of listings posted daily on the site, serve no self interest).
Oswald discovered Craigslist about a year ago and, while she won't go as far as to say that it's changed her life, she's incorporated the site into her consumer lifestyle: scoring prime merchandise for herself and sharing discoveries with others.
Founded 13 years ago, Craigslist is a network for free online classified advertisements that has swelled in popularity because of its unfussy format and zero cost. And, as the Curb Alert phenomenon attests, it's also become an outlet for positive community interaction and selflessness.
"People are very friendly," Oswald says. "Very outgoing, very honest. They seem to enjoy giving and selling this stuff, as well as finding bargains."
What Craigslist shares in common with so many new technology-fueled trends is the way it is, strangely, antique. Ignore the computers and what you're left with is practically medieval. Ye olde town kiosk - a free, accessible place to nail your notices. "There is a lot of anthropological material about the roll of giving in society," says Deron Beal, founding owner of
Freecycle.org. "Capitalist markets in the last 150 years have negated that gifting element in societies. Barn raising, quilting bees, tribesmen trading their items.... It's neat to see that gifting coming back on its own terms on a global scale."
Beal has probably thought more about this issue than most as he's watched the company he started out of his Tucson home grow from a tiny list-serve with a few dozen members to a full-blown international phenomenon in a five-year span. Drawing on his work experience with non-profits and his passion for recycling, Beal created an online network where people could both look for things they need and give new homes to items they wanted to get rid of, with a twin purpose of redistribution and waste reduction.
"From each according to his junk, to each according to her need" their slogan goes. It's a small concept with a big benefit. Freecyle now claims to be keeping over 600 tons a day out of landfills, the equivalent of over five times the height of Mt. Everest when stacked in garbage trucks. With over 5.7 million members in more than 85 countries --Detroit boasts over 9000 members-- it also lays claim to being the largest environmental Web community in the world and is ranked by Yahoo as the third most searched environmental term on the planet.
During natural disasters, like Hurricane Katrina and a recent Tucson blaze, Freecycle was there to meet a very tangible need as the Red Cross assisted victims in signing up to their local Freecycle groups to find replacements for the things they'd lost. But Freecycle and Craigslist users are also, by definition, Internet users, which puts them in a higher financial bracket than your average charity recipient. Without discounting the environmental and emergency benefits of online exchange communities, it's hard not to wonder if the rest of the time they're not just stoking the consumerist impulses of the middle class.
Upscale secondsYvonne Spampinato has seen this first-hand at Royal Oak's
Lost & Found Vintage, the high-end resale clothing shop she manages. Opened five yeas ago on the day of the
Michigan Blackout, Lost & Found has seen a steady incline in sales, even as some of their retail boutique neighbors sag from the current economic slowdown. The classy, eclectic store pays for used clothes in trade or with cash (a third to half of the cost they'll sell for). Spampinato says they have strong standards for what they'll buy and pay close attention to presentation. "We keep it 'thin,' so it's not overstuffed. Our main obligation is to be approachable."
Lost & Found has a website in the works, but for now there is essentially no online component to their business. So what makes them not just viable but thriving in today's weak economy? "I definitely see a lot of impulse buying, whether or not it's something they can do," Spampinato says. "People feel that they can treat themselves more here because the prices are so reasonable." She points to a pin on the register which says "We refuse to participate in recession."
Nicole Freund and Melanie Williams opened
Regeneration New & Used Clothing in Ferndale just over a year ago. So far, they say, business has been good. Surprisingly good. It might be too early to tell if the used clothing industry itself is recession-proof but they feel encouraged by what they've seen. Freund says that as the economy tightens, the innate desire of Michiganders to spend simply doesn't go away, sending those in need of a fix through their doors. "People never stop shopping," Freund says. "It's like getting your hair done. You just don't stop doing it, even if you don't have money to, you keep doing it. So you have to find ways to do it without spending a whole lot of money."
"People just want to buy a pair of
True Religion jeans for 50 bucks instead of 200," Williams adds.
What all these signs could point to is not so much a new
type of thinking as a new
shape. The old model was linear - an item is manufactured, shipped to a store, taken home buy the consumer, discarded and left on a giant pile of trash. It was a straight line, and one with a dead end. The new form is the more circular, more spiritual even, like yin swirling into yang. After all, the icon for recycling does resemble a snake eating its own tail. And as more and more businesses are finding out, this approach is not just more wholistic, it's more profitable.
Trade yaMetro Trading Association and
TradeFirst.com are two examples of how the exchange culture can fatten a company's bottom line. Both connect businesses of all types and sizes through a bartering network where excess goods and services can be exchanged, like cash. Whether pet stores, massage therapists, printers, or plumbers, at some point they all find themselves in the position of letting stock and man hours go to waste. By placing them in contact with each other, and facilitating the exchange, bartering companies are, in effect, creating wealth out of waste. A dry cleaner could offer free laundering, which gets placed into a communal account in the form of trade currency. That dry cleaner could then, for example, go spend that trade currency at a jeweler participating in the program.
"It's all based on extra capacity," says Fred Detwiler of TradeFirst. "If you go to a big game at The Palace, there might be an empty seat or two. That's excess capacity. They could trade that extra seat for goods or services. Unlike an Entertainment coupon book, where even if it's a 50% discount, you still have to come up with the other 50% to utilize that coupon. We create money by having our member companies sell what they would have sold anyway, so there's no additional overhead."
Though TradeFirst has been around long enough to have seen and weathered markets of all kinds, Detwiler says business is actually up in the looming recession. Mark Manning of Metro Trade Association has been with the company 11 years and agrees that their business solution is making more and more sense as companies look for ways to save while still moving forward.
"Right now people are trying to hold on to as much cash as they can," Manning says. "Bartering is a way to aquire the same goods and services you want without using cash." He says business is up 70 percent over the past two years.
Waste not, want notWhile bartering may offer perks, other businesses are tapping into the exchange movement for more activist reasons.
Architectural Salvage Warehouse of Detroit began four years ago with the idea that too much of Detroit's history was going into the landfill. The non-profit collects the raw materials from demolished and decaying urban homes and stores them at their warehouse, where they are purchased and given back to the community at affordable prices.
As a way of explaining ASWD's impact, Executive Director Tom Friesen describes one of their current projects: A condominium complex scheduled for construction at Rosa Parks and Warren, which will use 96 recycled shipping containers, welded to
gether to form the structure. To support the project, ASWD is deconstructing a '20s-era farm house in Holly from which all of the wood and recyclable materials extracted will be provided to the Detroit condo, offering them 100% recycled materials to work with. In turn, the demolished farm will be converted into a new, "totally green, environmentally efficient" community building.
Friesen sees what his company does as part of a "growing through process" nationwide. He speaks fondly of California, which he says is way ahead in terms of sustainability and creating a green economy. When ASWD started, he says there were 500 organizations doing similar work but that that number has since increased by 300 percent. Job creation is also a big component of their mission and this year they were awarded a $125,000 grant by the city of Detroit to train and employ low-income residents in the deconstruction field.
While it might be overly optimistic to view exchange culture as the ticket to becoming recession-proof, there's no denying it has become an increasingly smart, not to mention conscientious, way to make more of less.
"It's a trying time out there," Detwiler says. "But there's no reason for people to hide. They can live their lives."
Daniel Johnson likes to write, among other things. This is his first story for Metromode.