CENTERPIECE : The New Bull Market : More people are using barter as an alternative to paying with scarce cash. Groups make it easier to plug into the system.

Adam did it to get Eve.

Early colonists did it to get food.

So Bob Gibson figured he’d do it to get braces for his son’s teeth.

“We were talking about $3,000, so at first the dentist was a little skeptical about the concept of doing it on trade,” said Gibson, a principal in Buena Financial, a Ventura lending corporation.

“But I said that because of the expense, we only had the budget to spend barter, and not cash. And after I explained the ins and outs of it, he said he thought it might actually be fun.”

What Gibson explained was an ancient system of doing business that’s gaining popularity around the county--as well as nationwide--as more and more people are discovering good ol’ fashioned swapping as an alternative to paying with hard currency.

These days, the practice once referred to as horse trading--now called bartering--is usually done via computer.

“In today’s economy, there isn’t enough cash, so what we try to do is help people get business--and maintain a lifestyle--that they otherwise wouldn’t have,” said Diane Vantrees, general manager of SCM Barter Services in Ventura.

The bartering group was formed two years ago and now has more than 200 members countywide. Although most are small-business owners, many are individuals with a specific service to offer--such as giving massages or manicures--or people who have a onetime big-ticket item, such as real estate, to exchange.

“Another advantage is that, for a lot of businesses, barter also can open up new markets,” Vantrees said.

For Bob Burk, regional director of sales with the Radisson Suite Hotel in Oxnard, bartering room nights over the past year has made it possible for the hotel to obtain everything from new upholstery and a resurfaced parking lot to printing services for brochures. All of those services, Burk said, might have been put off if paying cash had been necessary.

“A great percentage of the time the room wouldn’t be filled anyway, so the actual cost to us is not the same as credit,” Burk said, adding that the hotel also has gotten repeat clientele because of it. “We feel like we’re getting a good deal.”

Burk clearly isn’t the only one who thinks so. Last year, the total value of bartered goods and services in the United States and Canada was $6.45 billion, a 9.3% increase from 1991, according to the International Reciprocal Trade Assn. in Virginia.

The number of trade groups such as SCM--which generally have a membership cost and receive a commission on all transactions--also has increased. In 1989, there were about 300 such groups, compared to 520 last year.

In contrast to the bartering of old--which often came from the “I’ll swap you my chicken for your hen” school of negotiation--members of bartering clubs such as SCM are afforded a bit more flexibility. Rather than trade their products or services directly for someone else’s, members build up credits--sometimes called “barter bucks” and issued in coupon form--which can be exchanged for anything offered by another barter group member.

Members with credits burning a hole in their pockets are put in touch with the kind of product or service they want by a “barter broker,” who works for the network.

“Say, for instance, that you own a mechanic shop and need your house painted, but the house painter doesn’t need mechanical work,” Vantrees said. “You go ahead and have the painter do $500 worth of work, you sign a voucher for $500, and the painter would then have that much money to use in the system any way he wanted. The mechanic would then owe the system $500.”

Members say bartering can take a bit more work than paying with cash--and sometimes complex reasoning is required to do it--but that it’s worth the effort.

“You almost have to be a wheeler-dealer type of person, a trader, to do it,” said Pete Bundy, office manager for Buena Financial in Ventura. “But in this time of recession, it’s just plain smart.

“A practical way we did it, for example, was with property that we had acquired that was of no use to us. We couldn’t get out of it what we had put into it, and so we were just sitting on it. What we did was give SCM the land in exchange for trade credits, which we then used for accounting services, restaurant meals, letterhead printing, all kinds of things.”

“In essence,” he said, “we got top dollar.”

Limited two years ago to a small number of goods and services around the county, SCM members today can obtain everything from auto repairs, clothing and jewelry to secretarial services, weight loss assistance and X-rays.

“I bartered for some real estate,” said one local furniture importer, who asked not to be identified. “I gave some furniture to SCM, which they displayed for sale in their office or had in a warehouse. . . . I had the full value of that furniture in credits, which I used to get equity in a house.”

Even if a desired product or service isn’t offered by a barter club member, sometimes it’s possible to do what Gibson did with his dentist: persuade the person to join the system. In many cases, that is accomplished by simply pointing out the alternative.

“I think what really enticed him to do it was that, No. 1, I was giving him the full value of his services up front, instead of his having to discount it and then be paid in cash over time,” said Gibson, who added that he has known members to persuade psychiatrists and psychotherapists to join the barter group.

“But No. 2 was that if he hadn’t accepted (the barter proposal), I would have gone elsewhere. If some dentist out there needed his house painted or something like that, he’d start scratching his head and thinking about it.”

That’s not to say, however, that there aren’t certain drawbacks to bartering.

Robert Rezzonico, owner of a small Santa Paula paving company, said he joined SCM about a year ago and has already earned plenty of barter bucks by laying asphalt for hotels, restaurants and real estate brokers in the county. Unfortunately, he said, he can’t spend his credits the way he’d like to.

“The things I need, like gasoline and oil, they don’t want to barter those things,” Rezzonico said. “So you think about what else you might need, but you don’t really know what the services are really worth. I might be able to get my house painted for $1,500 with cash, but someone in the barter system might charge $2,500. That means I’d have to charge more for my asphalt work.”

The same concern holds true for Ventura print shop owner Dieter Goerke, who said he was approached by another business owner about joining the barter network--but declined.

“Look, I would still have to buy material, and so does everyone else,” Goerke said. “The tire store doesn’t get tires for nothing, either. I didn’t want to do it because I’m not affluent enough to do work in exchange for things I don’t need--like hotels and meals.”

“And besides,” he added, “you wonder sometimes if everything is on the up and up, you know?”

Goerke’s uncertainty isn’t without cause. In the past, bartering has had a somewhat shady reputation as a less than legal way of doing business--which, in many instances, was the case.

But in the early 1980s, the Internal Revenue Service recognized bartering as a legitimate way to do business--provided, that is, that barter bucks are treated the same way as real dollars when it comes to paying taxes.

SCM’s Vantrees said her company provides members with account statements and a year-end 1099-B form that lets the government know how many trade dollars exchanged hands. Sales tax on all items and services, she added, also must be paid by members up front and in cash.

As for Rezzonico’s problem of not finding enough businesses in the network to make it worth his while, that, too, may be changing.

Within the next several months, SCM is expected to merge with Business Exchange International, a Burbank-based barter association that has 80 offices and 17,000 business members nationwide. The barter network is one of a handful of such groups that has business members across the country.

What that means for Ventura County barter members, said Business Exchange International President Stephen Friedland, is in essence a national bartering mall.

“Being a part of a national group really allows you to get whatever services you want, wherever you are,” Friedland said.

“It also protects you. If your local trade organization has problems, and if people drop out of the system, you can use your trade credits anyway.”

SCM’s Vantrees doesn’t seem very worried about that happening. She said business is so good and the barter group already has such a variety of services to offer that she discouraged this reporter from writing a story. And she refused to disclose the identities of any SCM member businesses.

“We really don’t need the publicity,” Vantrees said from her small office in the Mervyn’s shopping center. “Most of the businesses that join are referred to us by other members, and the last thing we want is to get calls like the one we got from a woman who said she had an old couch she wanted to trade to get her tree trimmed. That’s not what we’re about.”

But when SCM changes its name and becomes a satellite office of Business Exchange International--as both Vantrees and Friedland said it will--things may be different.

Even, it seems, for the woman with the couch who wants her tree trimmed.

“Everybody’s got something, I don’t care who they are or what they do,” said Craig Kaufman, president of ITEX Barter in Chicago, another nationwide group with 75 offices across the country and 10,000 members.

“What barter groups do is get it out there where other people can find out about it. And if it’s out there,” he said, “you can trade it.”

Real Deals Big and Small

You remember bartering, don’t you? You know, that thing you learned to do in grade school when your friend wanted your tuna fish sandwich and you wanted his cookie?

OK, so it’s a bit more complicated now. They use computers. You don’t always know the person you’re swapping with. And sometimes, the person can even be in another state or country.

But some things never change. Like the question you asked yourself as you handed over your sandwich: Am I getting a good deal?

It’s hard to judge objectively when it concerns you. So take a look, instead, at the following trades. Then you decide who came out on top:

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An Orange County woman, married to a businessman who was a member of a local trade exchange, bartered with her obstetrician for the delivery of her daughter. The doctor agreed to the arrangement after he learned that a local pet store owner also was in the trade exchange. The doctor’s payment for his medical services? Alaskan malamute puppies.

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A Detroit roofing company owner--perhaps pining over his city’s lack of oceanfront property--bartered through his local exchange for scuba diving lessons.

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A Massachusetts couple didn’t have enough cash to spring for a honeymoon at a swanky Vermont hotel, but they did have barter bucks. The hotel owner, in turn, used his credits to get 30 seconds of radio advertising.

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McDonnell Douglas Helicopter was stuck with more nuts and bolts than it knew what to do with--officially worth $16 million, but which only would fetch $500,000 by liquidators. The company traded the hardware to a barter exchange for the full value, in exchange for whatever barter club services it desired.

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Pepsi-Cola International, for reasons we can only speculate about, traded soda syrup to the former Soviet Union for Stolichnaya vodka. (Actually, this is a close call: Strictly speaking, the syrup was sold for rubles, which aren’t exactly in big demand back in the States. So Pepsi used them to obtain a more liquid currency with greater appeal.)