something for nothing: come on, who wants to trade?!

There's truth behind the saying "Nothing is ever truly free." Most great deals actually turn out to be scams or can require extensive amounts of your time and energy. Some freebies require that you register your address, which may bury you in junk mail, emails, or those damn telemarketer phone calls. Others promote their product as “free” but turn out to merely be a rebate offer that will be redeemed months after the purchase causing most clients to never even bother with the hassle. But maybe I am just jaded. Maybe there is a way to truly get something for free; people just need to learn to get creative.

I was involved in a youth group that planned weekly activities and games for all the high school kids in town to enjoy. However, since I grew up in a small farm town, they had to get creative. You can only tip cows so many times. So, they created “Something for Nothing.” The concept is simple: which team can get the best item traded for their ‘nothing’. The ‘nothing’ was always a rock picked up off the ground; you really couldn’t get anything worth less than a crappy rock. The teams than ran around to nearby businesses and neighborhood houses to ask the question, “What will you trade us for this rock? The only thing we ask is that the item you trade us is worth the same or more than the item we give you.” People would usually give teams a pen, paperclip, something still deemed pretty worthless. However, the teams would continue to the next destination and ask what they could trade for the NEW item and thus would get another item now worth even more than the second. This would continue for the allotted one hour until all teams returned to compare their loot and decide a winner.

The items the teams would end with were pretty incredible. We received an old car that didn’t run (the team pushed it to the finish line!), a matching set of four pint and shot glasses from Germany (great to give to high school aged kids), two garbage bag full of used clothes (surprisingly in good condition), and even a ten dollar bill (the person really wanted what they traded for I guess). Best item I ever traded for: a large pepperoni pizza fresh out of the oven. Sure these items aren’t great – but they are sure better than a rock! And they were truly free.

I often find myself telling my current friends about this game and get inspired to play again. I want to see what I can get for my nothing! However I am often held back by the fact that my receiving would be less welcome as I am now a 23 year old girl not affiliated with any youth group or children’s organization trying to get people to trade me something for a rock. It’s like I would be that 20 something trick or treater on Halloween without a brother or sister to accompany trying to score free candy. So it truly seems the days of getting something truly free is over for me; I have missed my window of opportunity. Or have I?

Kyle MacDonald created a blog, http://oneredpaperclip.blogspot.com/, to capitalize on the ‘Something for Nothing’ game but with a new twist. He traded his items via online to gain a broader audience (as well as to avoid those crazy stares from his neighbors when he tried to trade them a rock I am sure!). He started with a simple red paper clip and was determined to eventually trade up for a house. It seemed to be an impossible feat, but one year and 14 trades later, Kyle received his house worth $119,000… all for free. Sure, it involved time and energy on his part, but I think it was obviously worth the effort. He got creative and it paid off.

Matthew Tobey, another blogger, is now trying the concept again on his latest post found here. Well, not really but he as at least posted a similar proposal. Even if Matthew’s idea is for humorous purposes only and his goal a bit far fetched, it really would be interesting to see what he could trade up to. If nothing else, it gets my mind cranking into gear: what could I trade for nothing? Could I work my way up to a plane ticket home to visit friends? A ticket is worth only about $500 dollars, a seemingly much easier goal considering a house is worth 238 times that. So let’s start these negotiations: who wants to trade for my fabulous Pilot G-2 07 Black Ink Roller Ball Pen? Sounds fancy doesn’t it?!