MONEY SUBSTITUTES

Grey River Argus, 18 January 1939, Page 5

MONEY SUBSTITUTES

ODD METHODS OF PAYING. In an article which mentions odd systems of admission to the theatre there is one item in the list, remarks a correspondent of the "Manchester Guardian,” which the writer overlooked—the system of payment in kind. An instance of this, whicn must be fresh in the minds of many people with friends in Canada, occurred in Canada in the year, .1931, when money was exceedingly scarce and wheat plentiful owing to a great slump. A theatre manager in Lethbridge, Alberta, offered to accept a bushel of wheat as payment for a seat in his place of entertainment. The slump was responsible for similar odd transactions. A Magistrate married a couple in a wheat field at Oakley, Kansas, and accepted as his fee the bride s weight in wheat (two bushels) And in Indiana, wheat, eggs and other farm produce to the value of 16s was accepted by the Justice of the Peace in payment of his wedding fees. Even barbers at Sparta, Michigan, agreed to take wheat from then' customers as payment for cutting hair. A card sent out in June, 1931, by the proprietor of the "Wolseley News ’ offered to take goods from farmers in payment for the paper. The notice ran: “We will accept wood, meat, poultry, or fresh eggs to the amount of the subscription at the price prevailing in Wolseley at the time of delivery. Do not deliver without first ’phoning us, for we do not want to have too much of one line of produce.” One of the strangest of these arrangements was the decision by a brewery firm at Klattau (Czechoslovakia) to pay its dividend in beer instead of cash, each shareholder receiving twenty-two gallons of bottled beer. Whether this type of voluntary liquidation was agreeable to all the shareholders history does not say. Of course, there are places in the world where barter is the recognised mode of exchange. There is a record of a French singer who contracted to make a world tour, including a concert in the Society Islands. She was to have a third of the receipts. When her share of the Society Islands concert was handed over, she found herself in embarrassed possession of three pigs, twenty-three turkeys, forty-four chickens, five thousand coconuts and various quantities of other fruit. Two examples of payment of this kind may be added the arrangement of a cinema-owner at Camrose, Alberta, who would always exchange a ticket for a pair of crowd’s or magpies feet. Under this scheme (which delighted the local game preservation society) he handed over 3266 tickets in quite a short time. A comparable offer was once made by a Samoan cinema owner who was interested financially in copra production; he admitted natives on delivery of so many copra Unhappily the attempt to reduce the numbers of beetles by these means was defeated by the natives, who found they could breed the creatures with less trouble than they could raise wild specimens. This is, of course, a common result of pest reduction schemes run on “ the bounty system —or what amounts to the bounty system. Examples could be quoted from all corners of the world, but the most remarkable at the present time belongs to Australia, where both the aboriginal blacks and the professional trappers breed wild dogs in order to draw the bounty of 7s 6d per scalp. One “dogger” made such a good thing out of this business that he drew £7ll m well under a year, and another £667 in nine months. It is also significant that a district which in 1936 yielded 602 scalps produced 945 in 1937 and 1778 during the months ended last ' quarter-day.