Technology

60052 readers

2832 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 2 years ago

MODERATORS

[email protected]

792

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.

you are viewing a single comment's thread
view the rest of the comments

[–] [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.