live|work: Rent it. Share it. Fall in love?
by Tamara Giltsoff, United Kingdom on 02. 1.07
The Gold Blend couple sharing coffee.
The other day I came across Erento on PSFK. It’s official, renting or sharing stuff is socially acceptable AND, potentially, socially or romantically rewarding. (Renting things like TVs has been seen as the poor sister to owning your own for so long). Remember that once upon a time dating services were socially un-cool (well, they were in the UK) and now they are simply another mechanism to close a social gap and breed lurve. Well, you can kind of draw parallels with the renting/sharing movement. And add a bit of romance into the mix.
Erento is a German site with limited translation to English and I don’t speak German, but I can tell there are a lot of things on the site (from tools to cars to vacation homes to horse drawn carriages) up for rent. The site pairs renters with potential borrowers. That means, of course, we don’t have to own everything. And in particular it means we don’t have to own things that a) we will only ever use a few times in the whole lifetime of the product like the classic power drill example, or b) we don’t have to buy things before we are ready to and rush into making wrong decisions or cheap/fast decisions that we’ll then depose of.
For instance, I’ve just moved into my new apartment in New York and I have very little furniture because I've moved to a new city. I can either fill the flat with emergency purchases and rush to make decisions on things I will probably later regret or I can put up with emptiness for a while. I’d love to be able to hire some really beautiful pieces of furniture while I take my time searching for my own bits (or not!) versus going IKEA all the way untill later. I think there are a few hire companies, but pretty limited/dull.
How great Erento is championing the sharer and connecting people and tools and homes and people and more together. PSFK’s piece on Erento charts the ability to be able to rent protestors at “rent a demonstrator” – all apparently young and attractive!
Going back to the topic of dating and the social rewards of sharing, I’ve mentioned before a few of the services I know that are bringing people together in the process of making them happen. Zopa brings people together to lend each other money. Nike/Apple bring people together to get fit. Community Supported Agriculture brings people together to create investment in new food communities. More recently there’s been an explosion of sites that enable you to meet and coordinate travel together, like sharing a taxi to the airport or a room in someone’s pad on the other side of the world. Likemind brings people together for breakfast, all over the world, just to share ideas. Green Fusion in San Francisco supports LC Biodiesel’s “Biodiesel User Group”, a collective of likeminded people wanting to purchase an alternative fuel, and provides a fuel tank outside its renowned eco home store in the Marin County.
Renting from each other, enabled by a service like Erento, brings people together: you connect to someone who has something to lend. And making renting public, has made it cool and social. I have some good friends who met because he was moving out of his rented apartment, letting it to her. They fell in love and have been together 10 years and are now married.
What I like about the renting service or the examples of shared services is the way these sorts of behaviours are reconnecting the world, slowly shifting from a separate/disconnected world view to a participative one. So renting and sharing has the potential to breed romance and reconnect us… Just like the Nescafe Gold Blend couple of the ‘80s… (You can read about the romance and the coffee here).
My assumption is a participative world view has the potential to be world changing and full of potential romance.
Written by Tamara Giltsoff
Well furniture and other types of rental companies have been around for a long time. Unfortunately, they're mostly there to pray on the poor (who can't afford the one time purchase of say, a computer... or a tv... or a sofa) and often times, the family who first rented the stuff ends up paying double or triple the actual sales price.
Also, not sure what Nike/Apple are doing to "bring people together to get fit." From what I can tell, you run by yourself with headphones in your ears. Isn't that the opposite of participating in a community? If you ARE going to talk about some completely unrelated-to-treehugging consumer purchase that will bring people together to exercise, why not talk about the Nintendo Wii (which is supposedly all about bringing people together to move) or competitive DDR dancing... or if we were to shift from entertainment... various rollerblading/biking tours (like the ones they have in London)?
Bleh, ipod fanpeople.
Dear, dear Treehugger friend. Thank you so much for your comments. I have learnt two things from you/what you suggest: 1) Don't look beyond Treehugging/Green to innovate. Must stick all the time to being green/don't mix with anyone else who is not like you. Just like the environmental movement has so successfully achieved for 'most' of its lifetime and... ? 2) Don't whatsoever use a service before you citing it as an example. Like Nike/Apple. Which I have used and er does connect me to others and makes me run faster because I am doing so.
My apologies.
(Dear everyone, my mistake in this article was not to explain the Nike/Apple service readers. I am sorry)
Um, is that sarcasm? I can't really tell considering I can barely decipher the grammar. But let's see:
"1) Don't look beyond Treehugging/Green to innovate. Must stick all the time to being green/don't mix with anyone else who is not like you. Just like the environmental movement has so successfully achieved for 'most' of its lifetime and... ?"
That is totally not what I said (and I'm not quite sure how you could even pull that from my comment). I am perfectly for mixing with people who are not like me, and who don't live very green lifestyles. Though I figured that since we're on a environmentalist news site, the news you'd post would have something to do with the environment.
Lord knows, I'm a lot more than just an environmentalist and my interests go waaay past just fightin' fo green rights (and I'm sure everyone who comes here can cite having other hobbies or other groups they hang out with too).
"2) Don't whatsoever use a service before you citing it as an example. Like Nike/Apple. Which I have used and er does connect me to others and makes me run faster because I am doing so."
... Ok, I can't for the life of me figure out what the first sentence means... the Nike/Apple thing was a corporate product that ingeniously allows you to listen to music while recording how much you run. That's great, and I'm sure it makes you run faster (and longer, as music tends to do), but how does it connect you to people? Do you run with other Nike/Apple product users (without really sharing a connection, since the two of you are in your own little music haven)? Is there a Nike/Apple user group? And once again... and READ THIS CAREFULLY... if you're going to bother to endorse a product that's really not that green, shouldn't it actually have something to do with the rest of your post?
Or is that crazy of me? Oh my word! I'm asking you to explain how Nike/Apple contributes to the "renting and sharing," how unfair is THAT?
And damn, I noticed I spelled "prey" as "pray." Yeah, two completely different words separated by just one letter. :P
Renting is viewed differently for different people: some say it's a great thing, others say that renting has no good. I know one thing: the economy is growing if the consumption is growing. ">sell to rent
Renting is definitely green. We are actually starting up this exact same service in the United States, and one of our main focuses is the added value plus reduced waste that comes from creating a system where everyone can rent whatever they have.
Look for the site to launch in the next couple of months at www.iRent2u.com. Feel free to check out the blog there where we discuss this exact issue. I created a very thorough description of how renting is more green than everyone buying their own stuff.
To see the blog post discussing this exact issue go to http://irent2u.com/blog/2007/06/30/survey-still-climbing-reaches-347/