The credit crunch, enhanced frugality and easy web access have seen people swapping and bartering with gusto

EVERY SATURDAY morning throughout the mid-1970s, Irish children – at least those living in places where BBC TV was available – would gather to watch Noel Edmonds and Keith Chegwin help kids living in glamorous sounding locations, like Wigan and Hull, swap toys.

For three hours, as part of the Multi-Coloured Swap Shop, people phoned in offers and requests – badminton racket for alarm clock, stylophone for cuddly toy, guitar for Evel Knievel stunt bike – with the most headline grabbing swaps making it onto the top ten swap board. It was cheap, addictive TV for kids but, in the early 1980s as those kids grew up, the swapping stopped and the programme disappeared.

Well swapping is back in vogue and has been given a 21st century make-over. The credit crunch, enhanced frugality and easy web access have seen people swapping and bartering with a gusto not seen since global capitalism was a twinkle in Adam Smith’s eye.

A swap shop sandwiched between a café and a head shop in Dublin has been doing a roaring trade since it opened earlier this year while websites, such as swapbunny.com and barter-it.ie, have come online in recent weeks with the aim of helping people with stuff to swap get in touch with each other.

The most interesting new swapping business is the Swap Shop on Crow Street in Temple Bar. It was set up last February by Edel Geoghegan after she decided that a successful business career and a job as a lecturer weren’t all they were cracked up to be. “I’ve always had an interest in novel business models and, as I watched us move from extreme boom to extreme bust, I started thinking about what kind of business model would fit our times.” She decided on swapping: “We are Dublin’s first and only fashion exchange boutique.”

It works like this: if you swap like-for-like clothes – a high street fashion item for another high street fashion item or a designer brand for another upmarket label – you pay a service charge of between €5 and €10 to the store. If you swap a high street item for a designer product, the service charge can climb to €30 while for a reverse swap, designer to high street, the service charge is negligible.

Geoghegan accepts clothes from men and women, although the former have thus far been reluctant to sign up. “Men tend to wear their clothes ‘till they have holes in them’ while women are more impulsive when it comes to shopping and might only have worn an item a couple of times,” she says.

When Price Watchwent looking for the shop last week, we walked passed it several times before finally noticing it in a tiny mall off Crow Street – it is that tiny. Its size offers Geoghegan two advantages – the rent is low "which helps me to keep the service charge low" and it forces her "to be really picky about the clothes I take in. It really is only quality stuff."

She doesn’t accept everything: “I don’t usually accept clothes from Penneys or Dunnes – it is so cheap new that there isn’t really a second-hand market.”

There are some rules in her swap shop – the clothes have to be in immaculate condition and in fashion – so there’s no point in rushing in with that pair of flares seeped in genuine Woodstock muck or those ridiculously baggy jeans which looked so cool in the early 1990s.

While swapping and bartering may seem like the antithesis to modern business models, it is anything but. According to the Canadian-based charitable foundation, the Universal Barter Group, almost a third of all small businesses in the US use some class of bartering while 65 per cent of corporations listed on the NYSE are involved in bartering while bartering accounts for 30 per cent of the world’s total business.

Finella Naughton was aware of the potential for business bartering when she launched www.barter-it.ie in July. She says businesses in Ireland are missing a trick when it comes to swapping. “It is a global phenomena but we seem to be a bit shy when it comes to doing business this way,” she says. She believes businesses can use barter to grow without impacting on cash flow.

On her site she has a doctor offering corporate medical check-ups with a value of €100 a time in return for office stationery or a couple of hours in a conference centre. There are also people looking to swap spa treatments and she is close to bringing a limo company on board to swap its services for advertising. “There are so many angles and so much room to grow,” Naughton claims.

Swapbunny.com is another Irish swap site set up this summer although it is not focused on businesses. It was set up by Anthony Gibbons, a computer programmer who saw a gap in the market when he was moving house recently and could find no new home for several, mostly electronic, items that he no longer had any use for.

“The things that second-hand shops and charity shops want are books and clothes. They don’t take electronics so, if you have a games console or a kettle or microwave that you no longer need, it is hard to pass on so it ends up getting thrown out.”

This site offers people a bartering marketplace for that kind of thing. He says that during the boom times “people just threw things out and bought new ones, but they are a lot more conscious of where money is going now and are trying to be a lot more frugal”.

The classified ads site Craigslist has also benefited from the barter bounce and the number of people bartering on its US site has trebled in the last year.

Irish users of Craigslist have yet to follow suit, however. The bartering section on the Irish Craigslist had only three entries last week. One man from Galway was looking for someone to finish painting his house in exchange for free accommodation in the house – he’s emigrating. A 55-year-old masseuse wanted somewhere to live in exchange for daily massages (she does stress there’ll be no funny business) and then there’s a “proactivist” in Vermount who is “working to change the paradigm” and wants somewhere in Ireland to crash for 10 days this autumn in exchange for “art, news and life from Putney”. Don’t all rush now.

* Last week we featured price comparison websites and talked to Fiona Looney who recently set up www.smartshopper.ie. We said the charge associated with using the service was €11.99 per month. The actual charge is €11.99 a year