What we can all learn from Camp Snoopy
Town &
Country Planning, July 1999
The biggest shopping mall in North America is not, rather surprisingly, in the USA &emdash; it is in Edmonton in Canada. The USA has to make do with the second biggest, the Mall of America outside Minneapolis.
But even the Mall of America is still pretty impressive, with its vast undercroft to receive the coachloads of tourists hotfoot from the Tokyo flight, and its square mile of shops &emdash; a giant square of shopping as big as the City of London. And right in the middle, still indoors, is a gigantic though slightly uninspiring theme park called Camp Snoopy.
Snoppy's creator, you understand &emdash; Charles M Schultz &emdash; happens to come from Minnesota.
Now the problem for Camp Snoopy is that it must, for good marketing reasons, stay open seven days a week. But hardly anybody goes on Wednesdays. They must, nonetheless, staff the place and keep it heated.
It's a familiar business problem, faced by restauranteurs facing empty tables on a Sunday morning or retailers awash with Christmas stock in January. The usual solution is to spend a great deal of money on special offers and sales, backed by newspaper and TV advertisements.
But what if you made this wasted product or service available partly in cash &emdash; to cover your basic costs &emdash; and partly in local currency? Or better still, partly in the kind of volunteer credits like time money which people earn by giving older people lifts to the doctors, or making supportive phone calls or school tutoring and so on?
That is exactly what an innovative project is doing, linked to the Mall of America - the brainchild of an imaginative social entrepreneur called Joal Hodroff. His Commonweal scheme has been running in a suburb of the Twin Cities of Minneapolis-St Paul, and is currently developing a dual-track credit card which can manage transactions in two currencies at once. It is called the Community HeroCard.
For anyone involved in local currencies it's a very exciting idea. The businesses solve a problem of surplus without having to spend vast sums on advertising. And the value of the time money, and the social capital it engenders, is underpinned by products and services in the main economy.
The project has had considerable publicity in Minnesota, but hasn't yet spread out beyond that. But in the UK, you might soon be seeing something similar.
The second time money scheme was launched, in Newent in Gloucestershire, in May. About 30 more are on the stocks, so there is a flurry of people measuring their volunteer time &emdash; and using that 'money' to give to relatives or buy services themselves.
And the same time, in a completely unrelated event, the DETR is promoting the idea of town centre loyalty schemes as a way of fighting back against the out-of-town shopping centres, which have been depleting town centre shopping for the past decade or more &emdash; and based on the successful Loyal to Leominster project.
The New Economics Foundation is now working on ways of bringing the two together, along the lines of Commonweal and Camp Snoopy.
People earning credits building their local community &emdash; younger people giving lifts, older people doing grandparenting &emdash; will be able to use them as loyalty points which allow them to buy surplus stock in their town centre shops. The community currency is then underpinned by people's loyalty and belief in their own town centre.
Or, perhaps more realistically, their loyalty to their beleaguered town centre is encouraged by the fact that they are earning credits in a thriving time money scheme.
Imagine the day when you can't afford supper unless you go and help in your local school with computer training. It sounds like it turns the normal rules of the economy on its head. And I have to confess, that's why I rather like the idea.
David Boyle is an associate of the New Economics Foundation and the author of Funny Money (www.funny-money.co.uk)
