Сициннати уақыт дүкені: Еңбек теориясының алғашқы тәжірибесі

The Cincinnati Time Store (1827–1830) was the first in a series of retail stores created by American individualist anarchist Josiah Warren to test his economic labor theory of value. The experimental store operated from May 18, 1827, until May 1830. It is usually considered to be the first time alternative currency labor notes were used, and as such the first experiment in what would later be called mutualism. He also founded stores in New Harmony, Indiana, and at Modern Times, Long Island. 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". His theory replacing money with time was turned into an actual practical demonstration project. It was the first such activity, preceding similar labor notes in Europe by more than 20 years, and still has implications for other concepts of currency such as cryptocurrencies. Nonetheless, at the time it was the most popular mercantile institution in Cincinnati.

Warren embraced the labor theory of value, which says that the value of a commodity is the amount of labor that goes into producing or acquiring it. From this he concluded that it was therefore unethical to charge more labor for a product than the labor required to produce it. Warren summed up this policy in the phrase "Cost the limit of price," with "cost" referring to the amount of labor one exerted in producing a good. Believing that labor is the foundational cost of things, he held that equal amounts of labor should, naturally, receive equal material compensation. He set out to examine if his theories could be put to practice by establishing his "labor for labor store." If his experiment proved to be successful, his plan was to establish various colonies whose participants all agreed to use "cost the limit of price" in all economic transactions, hoping that all of society would eventually adopt the tenet in all economic affairs. Indeed, Owen thereafter opened the National Equitable Labour Exchange, which embodied the same concept and practice. The Cincinnati Time Store experiment in use of labor as a medium of exchange antedated similar European efforts by two decades.

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". The documentary film Anarchism in America (1981), by Pacific Street Films and funded by the National Endowment for the Humanities, argued that Anarchism had its roots in 19th America with people like Josiah Warren and the Time Store. 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. 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.