Kansas City, MO-KS (1888PressRelease)
August 21, 2008 - The Donald Trump paper clip was posted on BarterZap.com, a general public bartering web site, on August 18, 2008 by goldenpaperclip.com. Listed among the items to be accepted as trade are a canoe, an ice cream truck, a goat and a Pac-Man arcade game. In the short time the site has been active, the list of items offered for barter has gradually been growing to include a few rare collectible. According to site's owner the Donald Trump paper clip is rare indeed.
"This has got to be the most unusual item ever posted on our site", said Jeff Henderson of BarterZap.com. He also indicated that this was the exact point of designing the site. "It's just a place where people can post items for barter without any monetary system or price negotiation hassle". It seems that the Donald Trump paper clip could only find a home on a site like this. It makes perfect sense that an item for an exercise in non traditional marketing would be listed on a site the is itself an exercise in non traditional marketing.
Barter, is defined as "a trade or exchange of goods or services without using money." Its origins are traced back to the dawn of mankind. Early bartering was done on a one-on-one basis and is still used today between some individuals and businesses on an informal basis. Unlike most sites that specialize in bartering, BarterZap.com does not operate as a broker or banker trading credits used as a unit of exchange to facilitate trading. Jeff went on to say, "Facilitate trading? In 1626 Peter Minuet traded $24 worth of beads, knives and kettles for Manhattan Island. Barter credits would have made a trade like that impossible."
It looks like traditional bartering has become an exercise in non traditional marketing. The difficulty of finding barter items on other sites grows each day. Of the 30 million new classified ads posted on sites like craigslist each month approximately 140,000 involve bartering. "This is the very reason BarterZap.com was created".
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