adventuring as a profession is built around a simple loop: people need certain tasks done that involve a lot of travel, either to deliver goods or search for relics or protect people or etc. adventurers offer to do these tasks in exchange for pay, and usually get to keep whatever they happen to collect beyond the bounds of their job. most adventurers use the profits from these jobs to further fund their adventuring. to facilitate ease of access to work, businesses have sprung up with the intent to act as a bulletin board service to match adventurers with jobs. some of these, such as the Reformed Adventurers' Union, exist primarily as an adventurer coordination business, and arrange deals with other businesses to provide discounted equipment, while others are involved in other industries and provide bulletin boards on the side1.
Alton Koska2 is an animate skeleton who, through forces completely unknown to him or anyone else, is seemingly unable to die, at least as far as he's been willing to check3. in his second life he gravitated towards economics, which led to him creating the Loëz Hour Store in CC 1989 as an experiment.
the Hour Store is a general store with an adventuring bulletin board operating on a principle of "labor-for-labor": that the only fair compensation for labor (or the product of labor) is an equivalent amount of labor (or the product of an equivalent amount of labor). thus, rather than selling goods for regular cash with a markup to make profit, customers instead agree to an amount of labor equivalent to the labor value of the goods they're purchasing4, which they can fulfill by taking work from the bulletin board. inversely, someone can preemptively take on work from the board and then purchase goods of the same value as the labor they did. the store issues labor notes, each representing the value of an hour of labor, which can be held onto to keep track of the labor value owed. for more intense work, people are allowed to negotiate the rate somewhat (since natually some things are gonna be a bit easier or harder for some people).
while it was intended to just be open for a couple years, the Hour Store was fairly popular, leading to Koska keeping it open to provide a better alternative bbs for adventurers (and also at least partially out of spite towards more exploitative bbses). Koska also helped with the establishment of a second store operating on the same principle in Noctilu, which has seen similar success. the two stores have been early adopters of lilicom technology, renting out palwidth to periodically sync bulletin board listings.
