Non-Traded Goods
Categories: Company Management
You are looking to sell your hockey card collection. You list it on an online hockey card auction site, and pretty quickly the cards are snapped up by a guy in Norway. He sends you the money...you package up the cards and ship them out.
As goods go, hockey cards are pretty tradable. They ship easily and relatively inexpensively. They are also mostly interchangeable, easy to sell on an open market. After all, one Wayne Gretzky rookie card is worth the same as the next one.
However, if you decide to sell your goldfish, that's a different story. Shipping isn't easy (he probably wouldn't survive the trip). There's no established market for goldfish...each one has to be sold individually.
It's a non-tradable good. It can't be sold easily over long distances. Non-tradable goods can include things that are expensive or difficult to ship, or things that would spoil or die during transit. There are non-tradable services as well. This category would include things like haircuts and spankings...someone has to be in the room to deliver them.
