The second category consists of what you can do to produce ongoing paychecks. These are skills, like gardening, leatherworking, small machine repair, alcohol distillation, hunting, fishing, naturalist (edible wild plants), etc. that will produce an ongoing stream of barterable products or services. If you don’t have this second category covered, you’ll likely end up a zombie and that is a very bad thing.

coffee is going to be one of those “sin” items that will have universal want – you can consider it a premium trade item >>> the return on that $1 buy in a serious SHTF is close to impossible to estimate …

Yet, for those who are preparing for a Mad Max World, it is only the rarest prepper/survivalist who is prepared for the end of organized society with the expectation that they can continue their lifestyle with no need for additional goods of any type.

As to just how soon bartering would begin, let’s take an EMP attack. Anyone who has studied such an event would understand that it could take years for the national grid to be restored if a major attack takes place. Even an EMP event that is solar in origin would have long term, though lesser, effects. Because the mass of the population doesn’t even comprehend what an EMP attack involves, for the first few days after it happens, cash will likely be accepted. (Credit card and debit card transactions, however, will not occur due to the lack of electrical power necessary to process the transactions.)

Within the first two weeks, however, merchants and private citizens will decide that they are losing inventory in exchange for useless pieces of paper. Because we are “wired” to value gold and silver, the medium of exchange will likely become gold and silver. The use of gold is problematic, however. Who, except in the most absolutely desperate circumstances, would want to buy a 25 lb. bag of rice, or a case of canned green beans with a Krugerrand? Currently it is worth just under $1,000.00. Using the historical method of creating “pieces of eight” from it is troublesome and the results are inaccurate, requiring every seller and buyer to carry around a precious metal balance or scale so as not to be duped.

At some point, if the collapse is of the most severe type, even gold and silver will fail. One cannot feed a starving 3-year-old girl a pristine 1 oz. gold American Eagle or, for that matter, a junk 1904 Morgan Silver Dollar.

About cheap dollar store items and their value post-collapse, I draw your attention to History Channel’s extraordinarily well-done “After Armageddon” (available on YouTube). This docudrama involves a global flu pandemic that shakes society to its core, and it includes scenes of bartering. The lead character, an LA paramedic, has cut his finger in the garden and it has become infected. He attempts to get antibiotics from a traveling trader who brings goods out of the city to refugees in the country where he barters. The trader tells the paramedic that he has no antibiotics, and that antibiotics are hard to come by now.

Spoiler alert: the paramedic dies from the simple cut to the finger because sepsis sets in.

In just about every Dollar Tree or 99 Cents Only store (or their competitors) in this country, tubes of Triple Antibiotics can be purchased for $1.00 now, as can all sorts of medical and first aid supplies. Beyond that, cleaning supplies, soap, shampoos, and other items essential for a normal life and adequate health and hygiene, can also be obtained now for $1.00.

In a post-SHTF, there will be no substitute for many of these items, and the supplies will be finite. By bartering, however, one will have the flexibility of determining which item they need more, a bottle of shampoo, or a dozen eggs.

One last thought, the current estimate of the number of firearms in America is 400 million. Yet, the owners of so many of the “Thuhty-Thuhties,” and similar firearms sitting in the closet have only a small amount of ammunition. Anyone who believes that after a massive societal breakdown that firearms will not be extraordinarily important is beyond help. Yet, these firearms will be simply nice paperweights without ammunition. Personally, I believe that ammunition will be the new “coin of the realm” and will have an important place in bartering. (Yes, the person who gets the ammunition will be able to shoot the one who traded it to him. My advice? Shoot back.) Do not misunderstand me, ammunition is certainly not the be all and end all of bartering.

As Rudyard Kipling once said, “A man cannot have too many books, too many bottles of red wine, or too much ammunition.” Having substantial amounts of ammunition in common calibers will give the owner the luxury of having a barter item that will allow a person to “fill in the gaps” of things that are missing in preps or which are running low.

In the meantime, that ammunition will allow the owner the opportunity to forage with it, and to defend himself and his family. Without an adequate means to defend the family (and all of the food and possessions that the family has accumulated), after a really massive societal collapse, the family will appear in the “prey column” of the societal balance sheet.