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

submitted 6 months ago by [email protected] to c/[email protected]

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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] 12 points 6 months ago (14 children)

Renting stuff makes sense, but there are still lots of inherent problems with tool libraries and the like.

They're great for a carpet shampooer or chainsaw you need once a year, but if you actually want to fix and build stuff around the home then booking a tool, taking perfect measurements, hauling your stuff over to a tool library, building it, hauling everything back home to check it, is simply an infeasibly onerous process. The instant you make a mistake and need a different tool, or check a measurement, etc, you're wasting hours of time, which is most often the biggest limiter for home projects anyways.

You also don't get to learn on the same tool and build up instincts and understanding of how it behaves.

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

You had it, then you lost it. It's for those things you need only once a year or two years or never again.

[–] [email protected] 2 points 6 months ago

Libraries of things should be state run and free at point of use. They should also be integrated into communities in a way that makes them easy to access. Instead of everyone having a lawn mower, you check out an electric mower once a week, on a date that you’ve reserved it, and the entire community uses it, or if in a large community, your immediate neighbors use it, and then it’s returned for the next people to use it.

Libraries of things should not only be for things you use once a year. They should be for just about everything that you don’t use every day.

Usafruct >>>>>> UsusFructisAbusus.

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