Traditional Markets

TRADITIONAL MARKETS

A market is any place where the sellers of a particular good or service can meet with the buyers of that goods and service where there is potential for a transaction to take place. The buyers must have something they can offer in exchange for there to be a potential transaction.

The traditional market could be understood as exchanging commodities between buyers and sellers. Some of its features are –

1. Weekly market:

It is a market which is held on a specific day of the week. Traders set their shops for the day and then close it in the evening. It has no permanent shops.

Since ancient times, Indian villages had the concept of village markets popularly known as the vil­lage haats. The haats are basically a gathering of local buyers and sellers. The barter system was quite prevalent, which still continues in a number of places even today. Haats are basically a weekly event and are central to the village economy.

When a weekly market is held in one village, the people from nearby villages also come to buy things from there. The day of the weekly market at a particular village is fixed, usually once a week or twice a week.

2. Barter exchange:

The barter system was prevalent in the earliest stages of man as a commercial animal. “Barter” means direct exchange of goods exchanged against goods. For example, Corn may be exchanged for Ox hides, houses for horses, pigs for poultry, lemons for oranges, baskets for bananas, shoes for shirts and so on. In the barter system, thus, one has to give some kind of goods to receive some other kind of goods.

Even today, in some of the interior parts of African countries and even in backward regions of India, especially in the non-monetized subsistence sector of some rural and Adivasi areas, barter exchange to some degree is in operation. There is no use of money or any medium of exchange in a barter economy.

As a society become more civilized and the complexities of economic organization begin to multiply, exchange through traditional system become more difficult and complicated.