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.
There’s a company in Brentwood Tennessee and online that rents very expensive camera lenses.
So you can borrow a $3000 lens for say $200 for a week.
There is a “tool library” sort of service (for profit) operating in my area. The prices are absurd—people are charging like $20/day for a tool that would cost $100 new, or half that used on craigslist. My projects often span multiple days, especially if there’s an unforeseen delay—which there always is because I’m a good engineer but a shitty carpenter.
I don’t use the service. I’m all for communal ownership but it still has to make sense.
Hopefully you have an actually competent and accurately-priced makerspace near.
There is a “tool library” sort of service (for profit)
Wait I am confused
library
Alright got it.
(for profit)
What
Ok….Why is everybody using the world “library” like it is an even remotely compatible concept with a for profit rental business??!
Is this just capitalism trying to purposefully destroy any meaning behind the word “library”?.
If your service is to rent tools out to places you are a tool rental company not a “tool library”. You would be a tool library if you were a community governed non-profit that let people borrow tools for essentially no money.
sigh it makes me so cynical how clearly libraries would never have been allowed to exist in a time as nauseatingly conservative and capitalist as this if they weren’t already old and boring concepts, the media, corporations, centrist democrats and republicans would all lose their mind about libraries being too radical of a concept if a leftist proposed them as an idea now.
:(
It’s a for-profit service that people use to rent-out, and rent-in their tools. Not a true library so to speak but seeks to accomplish the same. Except that people charging $20/day to rent their battery-powered Ryobi drill is absurd.
It’s a for-profit service that people use to rent-out, and rent-in their tools
So yes this is the same old shit as labeling Uber or Lyft a “ridesharing app” instead of calling it what it is, a taxi service.
The correct name for this type of entity would be a consignment & rental store.
This kind of thing has NOTHING to do with libraries whatsoever in structure but more importantly in intended function and community impact.
Agreed.
Note that the featured rate in the article is “Another rented a planer at £11 a day to fix two doors in her flat after being quoted £245 for a handyman to come in and do the three hour job”.
It’s not a fair comparison then is it? $80/hr is an expensive but not outrageously so handyman, plus they have their own tools to purchase and maintain and other business operating overhead (fuel and transportation maintenance) etc.
DIY—if you’re able—is always less expensive.
quoted £245 for a handyman to come in and do the three hour job
Power tools, hand tools, clothes, batteries, heavy painters cothes, gloves etc… do not make the job.
The skill of the handyman who can quickly and efficiently deduce an effective solution (described vaguely by a couple of photos and a description over the phone by someone who doesn’t know shit about the problem they need solved) to a carpentry/handyman repair and do it within 3 hours is what makes the job.
People often make the point about learning home repair as a way to save money, and true it definitely is a necessary skill to some degree as a home owner unless you have a lotttt of money… but learning to do your own home repair really isn’t “saving money” so much as simultaneously devaluing your free time AND labor time to the point that all of the incurred debt is inscribed into your body and lost time with your family or friends rather than in invoices for repairman. This leaves me hesitant to call doing a significant portion of home renovation yourself ON TOP of holding down a full time job “saving” anything even if it helps keeps monetary expenses down.
Rent-to-Own has always been a scam predicated on people too poor to enjoy a stable life.
The one in Chicago is great. They also had a huge collection of free seeds this spring.
Once I started using the tool lending libraries in the San Francisco East Bay, it was a game changer for simple maintenance.
- https://www.berkeleypubliclibrary.org/locations/tool-lending-library
- https://oaklandlibrary.org/otll/
Some bike shops also have public work benches with tools. https://www.boxdogbikes.com/about-1
It’s nice however let’s assume that it is the main consumer model. Then everything becomes possibly 20 times more expensive as companies need to keep same profit (shareholders) and now 20 people pool money to share the thing. It’s not a solution to capitalism, however it would work wonders for environment.
Yet it is us doing all the work for the environment while companies don’t lift a finger and get all the profit. Not a viable long term solution to a fundamental problem of wealth.
It’s not a solution by itself, but a library economy can form part of it: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NOYa3YzVtyk
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Here is an alternative Piped link(s):
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Piped is a privacy-respecting open-source alternative frontend to YouTube.
I’m open-source; check me out at GitHub.
The companies who have 20x the mark up necessary to survive will quickly see new businesses occupy the space to undercut them.
Hmmm I wouldn’t be so sure… It depends on their position in the market and how well they lobby the government
Not really, not every business is in bed with the politicians. This was a worse case scenario where rentals became the main method of purchasing, so everyone would be on level ground. Those making 20 times profit margins are not everyday businesses, they ae luxury brands who would still thrive on their branding alone.
Yeah, this is the one piece a lot of people miss: in any decently competitive market, individual firms have effectively zero power to set prices; they must instead accept the prices determined by the market.
Knowing that, the solution to that sort of corporate BS, then, is to ensure markets are competitive by busting monopolies, lowering barriers to entry, and getting money out of politics to reduce the effect of lobbying.
As a Dutchman, do other countries not have rental places everywhere? Over here every diy store has a rental department, I’d guess this is universal?
We do have rentals, but they’re more for large things that you’d use once and never again. Paint sprayers, giant floor sanders, etc.
They don’t rent things like table saws, thickness planers, etc, which would fall into weekend warrior kind of tools. They want you to buy those.
There always have been some around. Not all diy stores have one but there is always one near from what I’ve seen. People keep discovering them and thinking they are new.
What would you search for to find one in your area?
Home improvement stores and autoparts stores will rent out tools for home projects or automotive projects. Looking at my library they also offer kitchen stuff, arts and crafts, 3d printing, board games and a ton more. I have no idea where you’d rent that kind of stuff here in the US.
In North America you don’t see many home improvement stores downtown where people are most likely to rent.
Most Lowe’s, Home Depots, etc so have tool rental options, but they’re located out in the burbs where land is cheap and everyone has space to store tools.
I learned a lot about your country during the pan when I started listening to the Dutch News Podcast. You had some wild stuff going on and I got to learn about another culture. But I haven’t been turning in lately. Life got busier again. Cheers! Oh, and when a German asks you for something, tell them to first give you back your bike once for me!
When I was a kid in the late 80s/early 90s, we had a toy-library across from our house. You could rent all kinds of toys for a week, extend if needed, and return it when the kids got bored with it. Good times.
They also had LEGO, and every piece had to be accounted for on return.
They went out of business when people started buying their own GameBoys and PlayStations.
We had a rental thing for toys in our old neighbourhood, but you paid for it with currency made from helping at the nearby petting zoo.
My public library had toys for rent when I was a kid. You could check out Teddy Ruskpin and Power Wheels and full sets of sports equipment to use in the park next door. Then the neighborhood got hit by the late 80s financial crisis and the program was cut. And then they spent an enormous amount of money on a computer lab. And then an Adult Learning Center. And then they decided too many poor people were near the library, making it unsafe, so people stopped bringing their kids there. And then it got defunded. And now its abandoned.
Libraries used to have all sorts of cool high end shit in them. Now they’re so heavily deferred on maintenance that people don’t feel safe working inside.
Real shit.
The USA has been going backwards for some time now. I’m not even some Chinese simp or very political (I made an account on .ml before I even knew what I was doing) but it’s impressive how far they have advanced over the last 20-30 years and how the USA has just stagnated or regressed.
I’m not even some Chinese simp or very political (I made an account on .ml before I even knew what I was doing) but it’s impressive how far they have advanced over the last 20-30 years and how the USA has just stagnated or regressed.
The Chinese had a ton of catching up to do after WW2. So the first major industrializations in nearly a century are going to hit different than what Americans were trying to do at the bleeding economic edge.
But the mismanagement of the American economy has been glaring. Trillions into a series of disastrous wars. A desperate clutching to legacy ICE, long past its expiration date. De-investment in education, in health care, and in mass transit infrastructure. Financialization run amuck, to the point that fictitious speculative assets are outpacing the value of real capital and estates. Stagnant wages. Declining living standards. Police violence from coast to coast that seems to worsen with each new administration.
Now that the US and China are roughly on par technologically, there’s no strong reason for China to continue to outpace the US. Certainly, they’ve come down quite a bit from the heyday of double-digit annual growth figures. And we’ve got ample opportunity for domestic investment in a country that’s needed an infrastructure overhaul since the turn of the 21st century.
But nationalism is like rooting for your local baseball team. It doesn’t matter how bad the Yankees are doing this season. You wave that fucking pennant or you get your ass back to Boston.
i thought this was called having neighbors? Nonetheless, i’m not complaining. Less waste is better waste.
Priced out of living in communities where you have friends and family to share things with? Hooray! Now you can pay us for that stuff in addition to your increased cost of living!
/c/orphancrushingmachine
I guess it’s easy to be cynical, but no, this is not at all orphancrushingmachine material
They pay a subscription for this… Home Depot and Lowes have similar programs that only require a deposit when you borrow the tool, which is refunded when you return the tool. And it’s not even a super expensive deposit. But it is only tools.
Rent-a-Center is still a better service, since you could eventually own the thing.
Home Depot and Lowe’s charge you out the ass for tool rentals…what are you talking about
It only cost me $50, which I got back, to rent a table saw for a day. The big machines, like a backhoe, are expensive. The smaller tools ain’t shit; most are under $50 for a day.
I think you’re mistaken…they refund security deposits, but there is a separate fee that scales with how long you keep the equipment. Maybe go back and check your receipts
Home Depot would prolly go outta business in that case heh
Agreed w/checking the receipts per the other commenter
Huh? You’re getting your money back? I’ve rented things from Home Depot and there’s a security deposit you get back, but you still pay to actually rent the tool.
I don’t think all friends and family own all these stuff either. And this really does save money. The machine here is at most consumerism, incentivizing us to pay extra and own everything we’ll use for like at most a month, which I think is too far of a stretch.
Well put. It’s preventing waste and excess for sure. It just seems like a manufactured problem from pushing us apart.
Curious what goods you don’t think friends would have back in the day from your perspective
Everything as subscription.
Yeah it is seem to be cheap now, until you become dependent on it.
On the flip side, when you lost your job, cancel your home subscription and become homeless.
Oh, I assumed this article was going to be about public libraries. Often public libraries will have things for checkout, like gardening or cooking equipment. Yeah, this is somewhat distopian. These companies will probably make bank off of this. It should be public. We need a larger library system for much more things.
Not sure I agree that it’s dystopian. Imagine how much less waste there would be. People with less crowded storage/garages/houses with less junk they use rarely. Like, I have this scroll saw I’ve used for like one project. Why the fuck do I own this thing?
Reduce. Reuse. Recycle.
I guess so, but I just see this going in the direction of not wining anything and needing a subscription service. They end up costing a lot more and nearly killing off alternatives.
I remember when corner stores rented DVDs, this could be another business for them. But…since they haven’t adopted it I guess it really isn’t that profitable. Power tool prices have come down in price and size.
We need a larger library system for much more things.
Private Equity goes REEEEEE!
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What could go wrong with depending on such a service? The things up for rental here are only things that have to be frequently changed or used just once or twice. I don’t expect to subscribe to more permanent things as part of the expansion of tool rentals. Yes, some like Adobe have already adopted subscription for permanenty things, but that’s different from this topic.
Ubik was right
What the fuck is this rent-a-center propaganda?
How stupid are we?
Stupid enough to wake up in this world. It didn’t happen in one day.
Pretty dumb. I thought this would be about lending libraries -_-
Tf are both you talking about. The article talks about Tool Libraries and The Library of Thing at length. It name drops a few subscription services for reused baby clothes and kids toys but those are still temporary items people need.
Rent-a-centers core business model consists of predatory loans for household appliances that you need continuously. This article talks about rentals for things you only need for a short period of time.
Subscriptions are just as predatory. I won’t applaud them.
There is a tool library near me and it is $45/yr. It’s amazing. These are really good services and this comment section has no idea what it’s talking about.
Hmm. It sounds to me you just don’t want to acknowledge when you’re being taken for a ride.
But hey, to each their own.
Businesses want a lifeline to our wallets, which is why subscriptions and renting are pushed on useful idiots.
“We can share books if you pay me to maintain the book sharing system via a non optional tax.” Universally loved system.
“We can share tools if you pay me to maintain those tools via a non optional tax.” A niche program most libraries have.
“We can share tools if you pay me to maintain those tools via an subscription where I have a profit incentive.” Literally 1984 and late stage capitalism.
Yep.
I feel like digital software subscriptions have stigmatized subscriptions in general. Subscriptions are great for things that require constant investment to be meaningful. One subscribes to news and receive constant reporting on the latest news; one subscribes to a tool library and get access to nearly every tool one can need. Plus a large part of the article is about non-profit libraries anyway.
The problem is that you’re renting access to something you’re not actually consuming.
Once you stop paying, you lose access and have nothing to show for it. They still have your money, though.
This is different than, say, paying for electricity which is consumed and no longer available for either party after consumption.
Sorry bud, you’re defending being scammed.
Plus a large part of the article is about non-profit libraries anyway.
Nice talking point just to cover your bum from shilling.
They can be, sure, but they can also be a really good deal. If I know I’ll need a certain amount of something on a fixed schedule, I can subscribe to it and save money. This helps reduce costs for suppliers because they have a better idea of how much stock they need on hand, so they’ll want to encourage you to subscribe with discounts.
Subscriptions are bad when there’s some form of lock-in, such as a fee for breaking the subscription, or if the cost is arbitrarily high without the subscription because of a lack of competition. I dislike digital subscriptions in general because of this, since you’ll lose access to all of the content you’ve enjoyed to that point.
But subscriptions to consumables are fine by me.
This sounds neat until it’s run for profit.
There is a business in my town. There’s probably one like it in your town. They rent power equipment. Anything from pressure washers to bobcats to bouncy castles. And as a man who has needed to drill precisely 8 holes into a concrete slab in 37 years, there is a genuine value proposition in renting a hammer drill for an afternoon compared to buying one.
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.
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.
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.
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.
This week’s rental for me:
- hammer chisel, 24h, about $70 canadian.
- E20 excavator, 8h runtime but over the weekend, around $500 with delivery and fuel
Not going to buy those things or pay someone to operate them. It’s a good deal.
We’ve got this & a local option!
How would that ruin it?
Modest profit isn’t an issue, but most businesses of more than a certain size accumulate MBAs like some kind of parasitic fungus. They then proceed to wring out as much money as possible in the short term while destroying the business in the long term.
If it’s just a local guy making 5% or so a year off his one rental shop, that’s no problem.
Competition solves this.
The problem is maintaining competition. Another thing those MBAs salivate over is the idea of buying out the competition, and their squeeze-the-company-dry method can give them just enough money for just long enough to buy a competing business to run into the ground when the original one starts to give out. Like I said, parasitic fungus: move to a new host as the old one dies. Keeping them from spreading can only be accomplished by stronger government regulation than many people seem willing to see in place, alas.
Yeah pretty much. There are behaviors that are profitable but not good for the community.
In a purely profit business, you price things based on how much people are willing to pay for them.
That translates into things never being priced as being “worth it”, but almost worth it, and definitely not worth it for people with tighter budget
So, the key is to run your business for loss. Wait, that’s called a charity, not a business. How is this thing supposed to work?
Libraries don’t make a profit, AFAIK. Non-profits and co-ops are things too.
There’s a local store that rents outdoors gear (climbing stuff, camping supplies etc), it’s for profit and it’s great. Would be way cooler if it were a library, but the local business is totally affordable and easy.
I’ve used it several times. My friends and I plan an outing and plan supply pickup/dropoff as part of the outing.
This is great! I’ve rented things from home improvement stores, and it’s often half the price of actually buying said thing. Hopefully this can get the price down a bit.
You’re literally saying you are happy paying half the price and not owning anything.
You could have at least bought the tools new and sold them after for a net maybe 5% loss…
Time and effort to sell is also cost
You do not understand that capitalism and markets are not the best solution for everyone, do you?
Yeah if I see a “used once” tool on Craigslist, I’m not paying 95% of retail for it
He said the exact opposite.
Seems like renting with extra risk and steps
Sometimes it’s better than the alternative. If I only need a thing once and I likely won’t ever need it again (e.g. a chainsaw when I cut down trees in my backyard a few years ago), I’m willing to make the trade-off. If I bought it instead, I’d still sell for half price and need to spend the time selling it. It’s a wash either way, so I’ll do the easier thing.
I’ll buy other things that I’ll use occasionally. For example, I own an angle grinder, which I’ve used a handful of times. If it was cheaper to rent, I would. But home improvement stores are in the business of selling tools, so they want to increase rent enough that people will lean toward buying instead of renting.
For anyone in Germany: https://connect.oclc.org/bib-der-dinge
Sehr stark!
I should start my own rental thing. I tend to buy what I need for DIY projects and I’m on the build up of tools phase. I can pretty much build my own house if I wanted, or fix anything in my car. So I got a number of toys just catching dust most of the time. But toys are fun.
“Honey there’s no way I’m letting you pay $200 for that bookshelf I could build myself, once I buy $150 in materials and $700 in tools”
People who own tools tend to build more then one thing.
That’s true, but there’s plenty of people like myself who buy heaps of tools with the intention of building all the things but just never get around to it.
Not sure if dystopia
It’s the cracks in dystopia. Good things that would be awesome without dystopia but wouldn’t start without dystopia. Public libraries are a relic of the gilded age dystopia for example
It’s dystopic if most can only afford to rent what they always need. IMO being able to rent something you rarely need is a good thing.
I’d much rather have my car for day to day driving and rent something with more space the few times I need to move something that won’t fit in my car. Even better would be to have ride share programs to use for medium loads and reliable mass transit for trips where I don’t have much to move.
it’s not dystopic in the sense that companies are selling tools to people who don’t need tools for an extremely prolonged time.
That would be fucking dystopic, being forced to buy tools you don’t need, because it’s the only option to get them.
Even better would be that Arcimoto MUV thing. Sadly it appears they went bankrupt
Cool
Looks a lot like a BMW prototype I saw almost 20 years ago. I kept hoping they’d bring it to market, but I guess it’s safe to give up on it by now!
They brought it to market for six glorious years but couldn’t achieve mass-production and spent way too much on a ton of SKUs most people don’t want before they basically went bankrupt.
These things always fail because ultimately it’s just a motorcycle with extra garbage.
And how is that a bad thing?
No one wants it. The people that are comfortable in a car don’t want to be outside and will replace their current car with another car. The people with a motorcycle don’t want it because they already have a bike. The cyclists would rather just have a cargo bike. Ultimately, there’s no market for these things, so they always, always fail.
Ultimately, people would rather buy a Caterham than one of those stupid things for about the same price.
There is a roof. People aren’t getting exposed. There are also optional door coverings I’ve seen.
The rest of your argument sounds like it works against any new vehicle purchase, not to mention the added comfort this has over many bikes. At around $19000, the FUV is cheaper than any of these silly, roofless and less capacious Caterhams you’ve linked. Not to mention gas prices.
Quite the contrary: it reduces wasteful consumption and reducing consumption is a requirement for Ecological recovery.
I would say that buying for very infrequent use or for a temporary need something which can be used with no problems for much more than that, is wasteful consumption at a systemic level - there should be alternatives.
Sure, owning your own personal high powered professional drill satisfies the greedy animal inside, but it’s not exactly wise of justified for most of us even just at a personal level. Ditto for quite a lot of other things.
The drive to own lots of shit isn’t healthy, both in a personal sense and in a systemic sense (including but not limited to Ecological), though it sure makes a ton of money for those who own most Productive Assets and all the ones is supporting areas such as Money Lenders, that most humans act as Consumers only limited by the maximum indebtness they can get into with their income.
Even if people can afford to own tons of things they barelly use, it would actually be better for everybody if that wasn’t common.
The only dystopia element of this is that in Late Stage Neoliberal Capitalism people are being pushed to rent because of the miniscule and worsening share of the wealth produced that workers get - or in other words, shit salaries whilst investment income has never been this good - as they can’t afford to own anymore, rather than because of a shift in the way people thing and them actually wanting to rent rather than own.
