Cincinnati Time Store

[7] The store in Cincinnati closed in 1830 with Warren being satisfied he demonstrated running and managing a business without the "erection of any power over the individual".

[5] The items in the store were initially marked up 7% to account for the labor required to bring them to market with the price increasing the longer the time that a customer spent with the shopkeeper, as measured by a timer dial; later this markup was reduced to 4%.

Warren also set up boards on the wall where individuals could post what kind of services they were seeking or had to sell so that others could respond, and trade among each other using labor notes.

As Cincinnati librarian Steve Kemple noted: When the advantages of the store became known and its method understood, it was the most popular mercantile institution in the city.

The people called it the “Time Store,” not because it gave credit or sold goods on installments, but on account of the peculiar and original method adopted to fix and regulate the amount of the merchant’s compensation.

[13] [A] Betty Joy Nash noted that, to varying degrees, the time store "communities strived to eliminate discrimination by class, sex, and race, and fostered education and scientific inquiry".

[13] Although it goes back to 1827 through 1830, Josiah Warner's "Cincinnati Time Store", which sold merchandise in units of hours of work called "labour notes" which resembled paper money, this was "[p]erhaps ... the anticipator of all future" Local exchange trading systems, and was even a precursor to modern cryptocurrency.

[3][18] Economist Robert J. Shiller used the perceived failure of the Cincinnati Time Store as an analogy to suggest that cryptocurrencies (e.g., Bitcoin) are a "speculative bubble" waiting to burst.