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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] 3 points 7 months ago (1 children)

Rentals seem extremely expensive in my area. $100/day for a shitty 4" wood chipper, $300/day for 6" chipper. For some tools, it's often about the same price or cheaper to buy a tool from Harbor Freight than to rent.

[–] [email protected] 3 points 7 months ago (1 children)

same price or cheaper

Ah, but is it? A quick search shows wood chippers ranging from $400 to $2400. If they're renting out the $400 model, yeah, you come out ahead by buying even if you're only chipping things on two weekends (and you could resell on craigslist or something).

But if they're renting out a $2000 model, I'm not sure how fair it is to compare to the $400 model (I'm not a wood chipper expert).

Wood chippers might be a bad example. I'd think if you need one, you need one multiple times -- chipping branches every fall at a cabin, things like that.

But overall, yeah, you make a good point that the rental prices can change the tipping point in rent vs. buy.

[–] [email protected] 2 points 7 months ago (1 children)

Sorry, I was unclear. Chippers are not the tools I was thinking of that would be cheaper to buy (a low quality version of) than rent. Was thinking more about stuff like torque wrenches and rotary hammers. Chipper rental prices were just one thing I was looking at recently that seemed way out of line with what other people from other regions were paying.

[–] [email protected] 2 points 7 months ago

Ha, fair enough. Yeah, a quick search shows low-end torque wrenches available for like $25. It's hard to see a rental making sense at that scale.