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How rental ‘libraries of things’ have become the new way to save money (www.theguardian.com)

submitted 7 months ago by [email protected] to c/[email protected]

224 comments fedilink hide all child comments

The theory is simple: instead of buying a household item or a piece of clothing or some equipment you might use once or twice, you take it out and return it.

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[–] [email protected] 6 points 7 months ago (1 children)

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.

[–] [email protected] 0 points 7 months ago (2 children)

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.

[–] [email protected] 1 points 7 months ago (1 children)

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?

[–] [email protected] 4 points 7 months ago* (last edited 7 months ago)

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.

[–] [email protected] 0 points 7 months ago

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.