My late mothers told me that barter was quite common in the midwest in both the 1920’s and 1930’s.
mother not mothers.
I'm 67 and my mother (a farmers daughter) told me that during the depression men would arrive at her mother's back door early in the morning to chop that days wood for the wood burning stoves and heaters in the house. My grandmother would provide a breakfast of eggs, ham, grits, milk and biscuits for the lucky chopper.
An interesting side to this story is the fact that she had to set a 'start chopping' time. Different men would try to be the first to arrive each morning until it got to where the wood chopping began at 3:00AM. Everyone was very polite and gentlemanly and would not accept anything they hadn't earned. People wouldn't understand that today.
I do remember seeing the Rolling Store at my grandmother's house. He always gave the kids a piece of hard candy. Grandmother would trade eggs for coffee, etc.
That's all I know about that story.
There was a barter system among professionals in the DC area back in the 80s/90s. For instance, an architect could barter office or home remodeling for a dentist who worked on his family’s teeth. Someone ran the program and figured out relative values. Worked pretty well.
Still common here, Hubby just laid some tile for a load of manure to use on the garden.
My mother-in-law kept an account journal in 1939 in Colorado. Her husband was away for many months shearing sheep.
She kept house, raising a garden, chickens, and pigs. She took in a boarder, an elderly man, and did laundry for him.
She didn't write extensively about life in general in her journal, but it was interesting to see that the price of a dozen eggs started the year at about 11 cents and increased to 18.
The last entry in the journal was one of celebration. Taking into account all of their income and all of their expenditures, they finished the year $10 ahead of where they started. It took a lot of work.