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How rental ‘libraries of things’ have become the new way to save money
(www.theguardian.com)
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this post was submitted on 06 May 2024
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A lot of these are non-profit or literally extensions of a public library. My public library has a "Library of Things" that costs as much as it does to check out a book. Free, with late fees if you return it late. It doesn't go as far as expensive power tools, but it has some basic stuff folks might need from time to time, like a basic toolkit.
Yes, private, profit-oriented ones will increase prices to increase profits, but thankfully not all of these are rooted in that.
There are pros and cons to both. Sometimes you should rent, others buy. If you use it every day then buying is often best. If you need it once a decade then rent.
Yes there are pros and cons to both, but that does not mean they are the same or equal.
Renting inherently adds an extra middleman to the process, (someone still has to buy it), who is incentivized to rent-seek and drain everyone from as much of their money as possible.
Renting really only works in scenarios where you have a bunch of different rental companies to drive down costs, but now you're starting to get back to the original problem of duplicating everything.
This is an interesting thought angle, thanks for sharing! Given the conditions you've stated, why haven't books inflated in price given the abundance of libraries in developed worlds?
Libraries are non profits, everyone who works there just gets paid a wage, no one makes more money if libraries make more money.
Or from a systemic standpoint, the library system is effectively separate from the capitalist system we use for distributing everything else. In capitalism if you have no competition you raise prices so you get richer, so functioning capitalism requires multiple copies of everything and a lot of redundancy all actively competing. The library being non-profit sidesteps that effect.
Only if there is a monoboly in place. If there is a market then when they raise rents you just go elsewhere. Since these are items rented by the day it isn't hard to go elslwhere in the city.
Not exactly. The type of rental discussed in the article is short term, not long term like an apartment.
Also, there will probably be a response in the industry, but it could end up being better overall. For instance, an appliance may end up being designed more for repair and have a longer design lifespan as there are fewer, but more educated, consumers of the appliances. I would expect a steam cleaner that has to run two times a week to be more expensive than one that has to run two times a year.
I dunno. There have been tool rental places with pro level tools for a very long time, and the tool manufacturers don't seem to have reacted to stop it.
I didn't say tool makers would stop it.
But there is a difference in design philosophy between pro tools and amateur tools. I would expect that, if the market shifts to more kinds of tools, the design of those tools will shift as well.
I don't really see a problem with a model of companies creating fewer, more durable/expensive items that everyone can share.
Better for the environment anyway.