I just paid a $9 late fee to the library for the book What’s Mine is Yours: The Rise in Collaborative Consumption by Rachel Botsman. I devoured the book in days, but held onto it in an effort to eke out every amazing insight for you, blog readers. Then lo and behold, I discover the book has a video that does a much better job summarizing than my Cliff Notes could ever do.
So go ahead and watch it now. I’ll wait.
Thought-provoking, isn’t it? We’re rapidly moving away from a “thingification” society and searching instead for ways to share resources to save money and reduce waste.
My favorite notion in the book is the idea of “idling capacity,” explained this way:
There are approximately 50 million drills in homes across America gathering dust. The average use of a drill in its entire lifetime is between six and 13 minutes. What we really want is the hole, not the drill.When you take a look around at your immediate surroundings, you’ll be amazed by the amount of waste that exists — not just in landfills but in the stuff we own but rarely use: the car that sits idle on average for 22 hours a day; the spare bedroom that is rarely used; the evening dress that awaits the right occasion; office space and equipment that are used for less than half the day; roads used only during peak times; 80% of the items people own are used less than once a month. At the heart of Collaborative Consumption is the reckoning of how we can take this idling capacity and redistribute it elsewhere. Modern technology including online social networks and GPS-enabled hand-held devices offers a multitude of ways to solve this problem.
In the weeks since I read the book, I have encountered so much evidence of the Collaborative Consumption trend, it almost feels like a conspiracy. For instance:
- Gap announces a corporate bike-share program and creates a pop-up store showcasing urban bikes (bike sharing is the fastest growing form of transportation in the world)
- The NY Times publishes “Learning to Share, Thanks to the Web” — an article about the various social networks cropping up that let people borrow or lend their stuff, either free or for a fee.
- A friend from San Francisco drives down in her ZipCar and dazzles me with her tale of going carless. She’s saving $1,000 a month. She matches her ZipCar to the day’s activity, i.e. red sports car to pick up tween nephew at the airport, then a sleek BMW for an important business meeting. The iPhone app alone is jaw-droppingly smart, making the lights flash on your car at the lot and doing other clever tricks.
So of course I try to connect the dots and think: how will collaborative consumption affect the mom market? Moms seem to be ahead of the curve in many ways: consider nanny sharing, clothing-swap sites like Zwaggle and ThredUp, and the rise in group-buying programs targeting women (which Google values somewhere in the neighborhood of $6 billion. That’s ‘billion’ with a ‘b’).
How else can moms band together and swap resources?
I suspect the popular AirBnB site (basically a way to stay with people when traveling — less than a hotel, plus more convivial) will either launch a family-friendly version or allow searches for families with like-aged kids. How much better than a hotel to stay instead where there are age-appropriate toys and a child-proofed home — plus built-in playmates and hosts that know every family-friendly joint in town.
And how about a resource for working-parent households to trade coverage on days school is closed? Parents have at least 81 weekdays to manage their children’s care when school is not in session — far more than two weeks of vacation and personal days can cover. A community of caretakers seems long overdue, and geo-local data makes it ever-the-more viable.
What else? A homemade baby-food co-op? A maternity clothes membership where you swap out new items each trimester? Gluten-free meal clubs? The possibilities appear to be endless.
