We were conducting business as usual when a person offered us $10 for a book. We're reasonable folks, so we started dickering... $14.93, we said. The response we got was insulting... something along the lines of "You people! It's all about the money with you people."

Well, the book is brand new, has a cover price of $21.95, was already marked down to $19.95 and is not available anywhere for less than $14.93. We were being nice! We're stupid that way.

But the "It's all about the money!" remark stuck in my craw.

It is NOT about the money. We'd give the stuff away if we could... in fact one of our employees has "stop them from giving stuff away" written into her job description.

Why? Why don't we just give it away?

We still have to pay rent and an electric bill and a phone bill and taxes and buy some groceries and a truck payment and insurance and hay and feed bills and more. We had to buy the book in the first place in order to have it here to sell.

But it's still not about the money... it's about a fair exchange!

The book cost us about as much as 3 bales of hay or 2 bags of grain or the materials for a 2-foot triloom. You can have the book, but you've got to send me 3 bales of clean quality hay or 2 bags of 12% protein (no copper added) sweet feed. I don't need materials for looms right now. We could also use a truck payment, but the finance company won't accept partial payments from outside sources... wanna send a truck to us? We'd need a replacement for our Dodge Diesel 2500 QuadCab longbed.

However, the place we do most of our business is called ebay and we accept payments through Paypal. We wish it were ebarter and Tradepal, but it ain't... yet... Even if it were, I'm thinking that the postage on a bale of hay would kinda scuttle the trade right then and there.