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Nearly 20 years ago, Canadian blogger Kyle MacDonald lit up the internet by trading his way from a red paperclip to a two-story home. Inspired by the childhood game Bigger, Better, where the goal is to trade an item for something more valuable, it took MacDonald just shy of one year to leapfrog from a common office supply to a home.
MacDonald was 26 years old in July 2005 when he decided that he wanted to settle down in a home after growing tired of paying expensive rent in Montreal. At the time, he wasn’t working so he decided to see if he could trade his way there. He set up a website and offered his red paperclip for trade, promising to visit whoever made an offer. This set off an incredible chain of 14 trades that culminated in MacDonald being offered a $50,000 home in the small town of Kipling in Saskatchewan.
“I knew it was possible,” he said on a BBC radio show. “You can do anything if you put your mind to it.”
His first trade was for a fish-shaped pen, offered up by someone in Vancouver. The same day, he traded the pen for a hand-sculpted doorknob in Seattle. He then traveled across the country to Massachusetts to complete a trade for a Coleman camping stove with fuel. There was a lull in action until September when a sergeant at Camp Pendelton gave him a 1000W Honda EX generator for the stove.
After a moment of panic when the New York Fire Department confiscated the generator, MacDonald was able to get it back and trade it for an “instant party.” This consisted of an empty keg, a neon Budweiser sign, and an IOU to fill the keg with beer. The party ended up in the hands of a comedian and radio personality from Quebec, who offered up his Ski-Doo snowmobile.
The snowmobile turned into a two-person trip to Yahk, British Columbia, which then snowballed into a box truck and then a recording contract with an Ontario studio. By spring 2006, things really began to snowball, with the recording contract being traded for one year’s rent in Phoenix, Arizona, and then that being traded for an afternoon with Alice Cooper.
An aspiring rock photographer and Cooper fan scooped up the Alice Cooper afternoon and traded MacDonald a motorized KISS snow globe. This seemed like a risk to some, and many fans commented their disappointment on his site. But MacDonald knew that someone would find the snow globe valuable, and he was correct.
Photo: OisinisiO via Wikimedia Commons (CC BY-SA 3.0)
In fact, actor Corbin Bernsen traded a speaking role in a film for the snow globe. It turns out that Bernsen is an avid collector of snow globes and jumped at the chance to have the rare KISS globe in his collection. It was at that point that the town of Kipling, population 1,140, decided to offer up a two-story farmhouse for the role. And just like that, in July 2006, he managed to get the ultimate trade.
MacDonald and his girlfriend moved into the house, but they eventually traded it to a restaurant owner. Today, it’s called the Paperclip Cottage Cafe in honor of this unique history, and the town of Kipling even had a large red paperclip sculpture to remind everyone of this crazy adventure.
As for MacDonald, he wrote a book about his adventure and inspired others to try to replicate his success. Looking back today, the project is a reminder of a simpler time on the internet, which was then used to make human connections and bring people together.
In 2005, it took a little over a year for blogger Kyle MacDonald to trade his way from a red paperclip to a $50,000 home.
In this TED Talk, MacDonald shared his incredible trading journey.
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