The Goods is a trading company operating from Red Sea (we're just Northeast of the Avaris Chariot Stop) in the massively-multiplayer game, A Tale in the Desert. We have two aims: to facilitate trade, and to stockpile goods. These two purposes go hand-in-hand. The more goods we have, the easier it is for us to supply people with the goods they need, when they need them.
Facilitating trade isn't just about large trades or high-priced items. Nearly every newcomer who enters Egypt winds up needing to trade for enough nails to make a tent, but the established citizens who have their own iron mines seldom want to spend time haggling with them over the small quantities involved. We minimize the time and effort involved in trade by providing a simple self-correcting pricing system for all generic commodities.
During Telling One, The Goods was a relatively late innovation, inspired by the Traders Bank of Phoenicia Commodity Exchange. It was a qualified success, limited mostly by the cost in time and effort of transporting materials to and from the relatively remote location in the North of Egypt.
For the most part, we are willing to trade in any generic commodity. By "generic", this means items that are not, in the game's terminology, "unique" or "complex" - things without special properties. This includes every kind of metal, fish, vegetable, and mushroom. It also includes worked items such as nails.
Some examples of items that we do not consider to be generic: hatchets, carpentry blades, metal shovels, flax seeds. If it's unclear whether an item is generic or not, you can ask an officer of The Goods, and we will make a decision based on current demand, difficulty of managing supplies, and other factors. If we find that there is demand for a specific variety of non-generic item, we will consider making an exception for it.
We do not demand that goods be useful. The philosophy behind the pricing system demands that we do not decide the value of things by fiat; if an item is genuinely worthless, we will simply stockpile it until the value drops to the point where people no longer find it worthwhile to expend the effort involved in bringing us more. Things that are useless today have a way of becoming useful tomorrow, and we wish to have large quantities in stock when that happens.
Some special cases: