I wound up with 4 bins stacked inside each other:
Lacking a vehicle, I had a hilarious time getting these back to my apartment—they were heavy and bulky and awkward. You can easily carry bins around your garage, but try carrying some for >100m! I put a lot of sweat into these.
The key point is that I didn’t need the bins for my own use. I acquired them for trading purposes.
This, many Bunz will argue, is a violation of the spirit of the group. If I don’t need the bins, then I must be trying to profit from them and that’s frowned upon.
Here’s my take on it. First, bins are a commodity that are periodically in demand. Every month some percentage of the 30,000 people in the group move, and they need storage bins and boxes. So they definitely have a trade value.
However, the demand is cyclical, and the supply of bins is not always synchronous with the demand. The value-add from me is to time-shift the availability of the bins to when someone else needs them. It’s that coincidence of wants problem rearing its head—a major drawback of a barter economy.
As a middleman, I’m extracting a gain from the transaction—and you can definitely interpret that as a negative thing from a purist Bunz point of view. However the benefit is that I’m smoothing the market for bins: they’ll wind up with someone who needs them, because I’ve made them available at the time they need them [Plus, don’t forget, the original poster gets the benefit of being immediately rid of the bins].
The other point of personal interest is that it marks the first time I picked up an item purely for the sake of bunzing it later on (The rum from Trade 21 doesn’t count since it’s a currency in and of itself).
Is Bunz going to turn me into a part-time junk dealer?
As it turned out, it took quite a while to get rid of the bins. What did I get for them, and was my arbitrage effort worth it?
Stay tuned to find out...
Next—Trade 26: Token for Steve Harvey's Act Like a Lady, Think Like a Man
Previous—Trade 25: The Team Cull Experience: Walking stick, clock and ray gun
Gallery of Trades
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