Collaborative Consumption:
Today we held a swapsity event where we were able to bring goods or provide services in exchange for other ones; this was meant to resemble a different economic system, like bartering or trading. While selecting the objects that I was willing to trade, I had to consider many concepts including values, supply v.s. demand, quality of life, etc.
An interesting idea that I learned was that it is complicated determining how trustworthy the people you are trading with are. In a bartering system, the other individual does not have any proof or certification that they are legitimate, and there is no consumer protection or warranties involved. This means that the goods and services you are exchanging may be exchanged for poor or defective items, or vice versa. An evident example of this was shown when I traded my pens from india, and the reality was that they did not work. Everyone wanted them because of their looks, but I got much more out of it than a worthless decorative pen. We must understand at times, it is easy to think the item you desire is worth more than it actually is and underestimate the value of your own item.
From participating in this activity, we got a little taste of how supply and demand plays into nearly all economic systems, including bartering. To elaborate, I brought a variety of unique things and made sure to bring limited amounts so that if there was a demand, it would be high meaning that the prices would be competitively high as well! My strategy worked quite well, as many of my classmates wanted the elephant key chains and indian pens I brought. Further expanding on this topic, this also incorporates the idea that high demand products are often scarce in amount, thus referring that there will be more competition for consumers who value it.
"One man's trash is another man's treasure." ~ Tom Zart speaks to the economic system that we tried to build in our classroom, where we move away from utilizing money and instead recycle our goods and services. By eliminating money from our economy, we are not saying that we can live on just trading our products. Producers will still need to be involved in creating more products to keep this system running, therefore we can never break the chain of consumerism.
Collaborative Consumption indicates the idea of collectively consuming items until they are no longer able to be utilized in any way, which helps to save resources and produce less items! Personally I believe that this concept can easily be implemented on the weekends, like a farmers market. Swapsity events can help to reduce waste and promote the reusing of products, helping us to save money to use for more valuable things (taxes or social programs, etc.). Embracing and applying these concepts of bartering can help to create healthier consumer identities, and collective consumer identities as well!