791
How rental ‘libraries of things’ have become the new way to save money
(www.theguardian.com)
you are viewing a single comment's thread
view the rest of the comments
view the rest of the comments
this post was submitted on 06 May 2024
791 points (97.6% liked)
Technology
59598 readers
2506 users here now
This is a most excellent place for technology news and articles.
Our Rules
- Follow the lemmy.world rules.
- Only tech related content.
- Be excellent to each another!
- Mod approved content bots can post up to 10 articles per day.
- Threads asking for personal tech support may be deleted.
- Politics threads may be removed.
- No memes allowed as posts, OK to post as comments.
- Only approved bots from the list below, to ask if your bot can be added please contact us.
- Check for duplicates before posting, duplicates may be removed
Approved Bots
founded 1 year ago
MODERATORS
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.