Collaborative Consumption: The Rental Society

Rental markets in everything, e.g. Toilets

In its October issue, Reason Magazine reviews the book "What's Mine Is Yours: The Rise of Collaborative Consumption," here's the Collaborative Consumption website.  The review is titled "Pimp Your Ride: Why own what you can rent? And why not rent out what you own?," here's an excerpt:

"Just a few years ago, President George W. Bush was still touting “the ownership society” as the surest path to prosperity and personal autonomy. But that was before we could easily search our cellphones for the nearest power drills, sedans, and spacious Manhattan closets for rent. What we really want, sharing evangelists suggest, is access, not ownership. And when we can use the mobile Web to pinpoint sharable goods, the burdens of ownership—which include maintenance, storage, and eventual disposal—begin to outweigh the benefits in many cases.

The emergence of new rental markets is also likely to exert a downward pressure on existing products and services. If the Web has taught us anything, it’s that consumers are quite generous in what they will tolerate if the price is right. The thousands of amateur hoteliers now offering couches and air mattresses in New York City and Paris for as low as $20 a night have the potential to undermine the prices that hotels charge in the same way that people who create content for free have changed the business model of Hollywood and the news industry. A space on the floor in someone’s living room flop house may not have all the amenities of Motel 6, but if it’s clean enough and safe enough and reliable enough to attract consumers on an ongoing basis, it will create competition for legacy hoteliers that will in turn create new waves of innovation and price reduction."

MP: Here's another example below: "Moms have swapped hand-me-down clothes with friends and relatives for years. Now a startup called startup ThredUP is trying to use the Internet to automate the process of sharing used kids’ clothes between people who don’t know each other."

HT: Steve Bartin