Adults have their version. You see these offers advertised daily in the classified sections of your newspaper. A more organized form of retail barter uses retail exchanges. These barter exchanges are not unlike stock markets. Brokers take a percentage of each transaction, allowing people to swap cars, horses, boats, farms, jewelry and just about anything imaginable.
Corporate barter is a little more complicated.
At least one of the parties involved is a public company. Corporate barter requires accounting acrobatics, using a mixture of cash and corporate trade credits to fuel transactions. The Wall Street Journal estimates that 3,000 North American companies, including 70 per cent of the Fortune 500, engage in barter. Most bartering deals involve trading off inventories. Trading inventories for advertising is a common deal.