TRADING POST The trading post was a feature of the early frontier, and was adapted to the trade

of items of technology for those items harvested from the wilderness. As the frontier was an anarchic place, with little in the way of organized law or social strictures, security was a prominent feature of the post, with external attack from the native peoples furnishing a need for basic military security, and the activities of the amateur socialists, who tend to move from areas of organized law and social strictures to places where those are less seen, which furnished a need for civilian security. These needs will be seen again if the society we live in undergoes a fundamental entropic event of the variety which the survivalists refer to as SHTF or TEOTWAWKI, a condition where the grid is down, and the law don't run. Trade continues even under the grimmest of conditions. The open merchant market, as seen in the Third World, is alive and well in the United States today in the form of flea markets, trade shows, gun shows, and a host of other finite events where goods are exchanged, either for cash or for barter. This is primitive trade, and it is harder to stamp out than cockroaches. It is arguably the cleanest form of trade, and it is low enough down that you can see up the kilts of the Gods of the Market Place (ref. Kipling, The Gods of the Copybook Headings). Wall Street and Madison Avenue hold little sway that far down, and marketing is based on the reality of the thing, and not the perception of the thing. There is a basic honesty to the open market that is enticing. It flourishes when the grid is down, and the law don't run, being an essentially hardy and perennial thing. The further we have strayed from that model of commerce, the more complex and less reality-based our society has become. Please note that the artificial lines drawn by our social engineers and lawyer-dung-beetles of the legislative assemblies are not honored down in the open market either. If there is a buyer, there will be a seller, and the Devil take the laws and regulations up where the legislators live. (They see fit to flout their own laws often enough, so it makes one wonder why we bother to try to enforce them on the people, when the rulers won't abide 'em.) The trading post will be a free market. It would be a good thing to have some idea what it will take to be a viable outpost of trade in a TEOTWAWKI setting. First, there will be a need for external security. This will be an outlaw market, beyond the reach of whatever gangs are trying to re-establish politics, or enforce those political structures that have survived. Make no mistake, the existing government will not want a free trading post to operate. It will detract from their power, and their ability to enforce their will based on the existence of alternatives to their monopolies of services and goods. The best way to remain free of their interference, which will likely involve bombs, gas and enslavement of the survivors, is to remain beyond their reach. Thus; a good trading post will be located in a zone beyond the government's reach, and will be fortified to counter the organized outlaws, or roving patrols from .gov's band of goons, who would,

likely, very much resemble their amateur-socialist counterparts. If parallels to the War of Northern Aggression hold, they may well be recruited from the ranks of the amateurs.... But enough of history and politics. This is about trading posts. Second, a trading post must exercise internal security. The less those from outside can figure out what goes on inside, the more secure the trading post will be. There are a variety of ways that barter can be done without a face-to-face meeting, and we will examine some of these at a later point in this bit of writing. Communication makes such things easier, and much of the internet trading that goes on these days is done in such a fashion. (E-bay furnishes a model, though its infiltration by PayPal and other social-engineering viewpoints have severely limited its useful product lines in some markets. A free-market alternative to EBay needs to exist, and some method of payment different from the credit card, which can be reviewed by the government and the social engineers, needs to develop. A non-governmental independent currency is needed also. Taking the market away from E-Bay will not be simple, but it will be quite profitable. Taking the market away from PayPal will be even more so.) Third, the market must be there, and so must the goods and services. A look back at the trade caravans and trade fairs of the Middle Ages can be instructive in the kind of guerilla trading that will need to exist in a failed society. The buyer must know where the market will set up, and how long it will be up. The seller must know that the site is secure against government or other outlaw interlopers, though he will probably be set up with enough firepower to handle the likely opponents. (For a look into how that world works, Louis L'Amour's book, The Walking Drum, is good and an entertaining read besides. As a study of models of operation in low-communications, high-threat situations, it works pretty well....) A central trading post, from which caravans operate to serve a cycle of trade fairs, and to which a variety of traders and skilled artisans travel so they may produce or repair the goods needed to serve the markets of the caravans would become a rich community in short order. Heck, they might even have hot running water.... TRADE GOODS AND SERVICES The one-stop shop will need to offer a variety of goods and services. Necessary goods would include food (grain, and the flour that can be ground from it, jerky, smoked meat, fish and poultry, and home-canned goods), cloth and clothing (to include yarn, knitting needles and sewing notions), leather and footwear, home medical remedies, and tools. Needful services would include gunsmithing and ammunition reloading, tool repair and fabrication, and production of needed chemicals and extracts. If minor medical and dental procedures can be handled, so much the better. Same goes for canning of customer produce. Food Goods

A variety of grain, both for grinding and for sprouting, will be needed. It is going to be tempting to grow your own, but grains are pretty hard on the soil they use, and demand intense cultivation. If you can purchase, you will be ahead of the game. If you do the milling, you'll get your fair share of the business. One field that would lend itself to trading post expertise would be the growing and provision of seed via hydroponics. A controlled environment, and breeding for better yields will yield salable seed stocks, as well as plenty of grain for the table. Meat can be handled with jerked rabbit, though a diet of strictly lean meat will, sooner or later, have bad consequences for the consumer. A certain amount of fats and organ meats are needed to balance out the lean jerky meat. Jerked venison will be another source, and jerked goat meat a third. Unless you are dealing with feral hogs, jerked pork does not store very well, and smoking is a better way to approach storing pig meat. Smoked ham, and bacon will store for a while without refrigeration if the preparation is done correctly. Pemmican is another meat product, meat, dried fruit and lard, that keeps well without refrigeration, and balances the effects of a jerky diet. Fresh fruit and dried fruit leathers are useful products for trade, as are fresh vegetables in season, or canned sauerkraut or kimchee out-of-season. In times of hiatus of service, vitamin C is not easily come by, and scurvy is a very bad condition to allow to develop. Rose hips are another good source of vitamin C, and they are a good seasoning for a variety of dishes, including rice. Offering a class in home canning, and instructional materials for teaching that set of skills would be a good way to get the customers in the door, and working with the trading post. Contact generally builds trust, and trust builds trade. Canning jars, bands and lids will all be viable trade goods to those who have attended your classes. How to make sauerkraut is another good thing to teach, and you will have a market for crocks to do kraut in.... Ceramics are going to be a needed thing. If the society as we know it goes down hard, the cheap glass bottle, and plastic containers will be, sooner or later, a thing of the past as well. Pottery was the old-time answer, and will, likely, be useful again. Cloth Goods Yarn is a staple of the trading post fare, as are knitting needles. Bolt cloth is another needful item, and I would focus on the denims and other heavy work cloth rather than the lighter materials. Needles, thread, bobbins, spools, and all the other impedimentia of the sewing machine will also furnish trade goods. As the technique is similar, but the materials are different, I will also include leather here. Leather needles and awls are going to be needed in a failed state, particularly if animal power replaces diesel in farming again.

Simple works on clothes making, shoe making and shoe repair should also be available for sale, and a simple work on harness making for use with horses and oxen would also be of value. Spinning wheels, carding tools and all the tooling to make yarn ought to be available, as well as plans for making spinning wheels. Same holds true for cotton gins. Home Medical Remedies I am not going to incur the wrath of the moderators on here by going too deep into the nature of home remedies and homeopathic medicine practiced in an austere environment. Some of the herbs I know about, the Powers That Be do not approve of at all, at all.... The same applies to the disinfectant I know how to make, and I am not going to get into the mechanics of generating ethyl ether with anybody. Fact remains that if the grid goes down, and the Constitution with it, I am not going to limit my apothecary shop to the nostrums the White Fathers In Washington (that don't ring true in the Obama Nation, does it?) permit and encourage. Practicing medicine without a license? If it is a matter of taking the man's leg off, or letting him die of gangrene, the leg goes, and I know enough to leave him a good pad to fit a prosthesis to after it heals. Should I let him die because I don't have a piece of paper hanging on my wall? I think not. Tools The trading post should have the tooling to service what it sells. If the post sells guns, it should be able to handle a modicum of gunsmithing. If it sells pumps, it should be capable of repacking one. Electric motor rewinding? Small motor repair? All of these areas of expertise should be available to the customer, or, if not, materials for him to learn enough to do it himself should be for sale. It is for such reasons that I have worked along the lines I have in keeping computers running in hostile environments. A PDF file can be read on most machines, and the early ones in the Pentium series and the later 486 machines can be kept afloat via the use of a car battery and an inverter. These older machines can be had for the asking in these later days, and a bank of 12, set up on battery power, could furnish a lending library of a capability far beyond the six books and bale of newspaper of the old trading post days in the frontier West. These could be a lucrative service offered by the trading post, and could offer a venue for later development into an educational center and trade school.